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She grumbled weakly, as her arm tried to blindly look for her blanket and pull it back to her side. What a nightmare she just had… Not only had it been ridiculous, it was purely terrifying as well. And annoying.

She really couldn’t find her blanket. Or her pillow, for that matter— whatever her head was lying on, that wasn’t her pillow. She was getting cold. So annoying.

… Wait a minute.

She opened her eyes in a start and stared down.

This wasn’t her bed either.

She saw a cold light in the distance. She stared.

Definitely-Not-Sans was sitting at the desk and had taped the flashlight back on top of the desk lamp so he could work on a huge messy pile of papers. Probably blueprints. She saw him wave a pen around and scratch the back of his skull with a rattling sound that made her shiver and she even thought she heard some grunting and mumbling at some point.

Until his movements went to a halt and he became stiff as a statue. Very slowly, she saw him turn his chair so he could face her. He looked annoyed.

“oh. hey. you sure like to take your time, uh?”

His head was now resting nonchalantly on his left hand, whose elbow was leisurely lying on the desk. She felt like he had tried and failed to sound friendly, but only his boredom and a reasonably controlled irritation poorly wrapped into genuine sarcasm had been audible, in spite of his possible efforts.

The human rose a livid head, her expression stuck with shock and an ever growing fear as her jaw gaped open.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope, nope, not happening, this is not happening…

Sans rolled his eyes cynically.

“nope, i’m still here. not a dream.” he sighed, rubbing his forehead as if he were trying to avoid face-palming too openly. “now that this is finally settled, maybe we could just—”

“Y-You can’t be Sans… Ha-ha-ha, right…? I-It just doesn’t make sense, t-that’s physically i-impossible…”

It sounded as if he grinded his teeth, as he slowly but angrily stood up and started pacing threateningly towards her.

“oh no you won’t. i don’t know how long you wanted to play this game, but I’ve had enough of it.”

Her instincts screamed at her to jump out of the sofa and get the hell away from here, but her legs did not respond. Then again, the door had probably been locked again by now, so it wasn’t like she could have gone anywhere.

The skeleton’s left hand closed into a fist as if he had just taken a grip onto something.

She yelped as she immediately felt some kind of pull coming from her very deep chest, but as soon as he put his hand into motion, all she really managed to do afterwards was gasp in shock— and for breathable air, too.

The next instant, all she had time to realize was that she couldn’t feel the ground under her feet anymore— and that she was now stuck floating in midair, her face standing hardly one foot away from his.

Wow, now that escalated quickly! You done goofed, girl.

His eye flashed with rings of bright cyan ember trembling in the middle of an obscure endless void, and his voice had seemed to sound even deeper than before. The right eye-socket was just pure darkness as its shape seemed to still enlarge itself in one round black hole.

Part of her wanted to scream, but her gawking mouth felt speechless and dry.

“Listen, kid. I’ve been patient until now, but I have WAY more important things to do than play the babysitter. Especially yours.”

“P-P-PUT ME DOWN!”

He didn’t even flinch in response to that hysterical shriek, instead slightly narrowing his shadowed bony pseudo-eyebrows. Unlike before when all that could be seen of his face was some vague pale silhouette under the electric shades of the torchlight, this time his entire features were somehow lit from below by a ghastly deep watery halo quivering between them.

Although his tone sounded calmer, for once his ever stuck smile seemed eerily in place as his left iris stabilized to an abysmal azure shade throwing daggers all around.

“at first i thought you were just being stupid. maybe you are. i mean, you did make a VERY dumb mistake.” The grip in his left glowing fist tightened and the pain in her chest doubled, making her yelp in surprise following the feeling of this ever narrowing constriction. “You REALLY must’ve got some guts to take me for an idiot, especially when you already know as much as you do.”

“I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU’RE TALKING ABOUT!”

He frowned more. His grip tightened more. Whatever that was that she could now feel pounding in her chest, that was huge, that was flashing dark blue, and that was hurting. It felt as if someone had somehow managed to hang her by her heart and it was doing its best to keep pounding at a wild rate as if it were about to free itself from her ribcage.

It hurt. He was furious and he was scary and it hurt.

“you already know this, but a long time ago… i promised that if any human came through the door leading to the ruins, then i’d have to protect them.” No matter how impossible it was supposed to be, she felt as if his smile had somehow grown even larger. His eye suddenly stopped glowing, although he still maintained a strong magical hold on her. “But you technically didn’t come t h r o u g h that door, did you?”

“PLEASE I’LL DO ANYTHING JUST PUT ME DOWN!”

This time however, he did stop; if only for a split second.

His hand faintly lowered, even if his grip was still keeping his prey at a reasonable distance from the ground.

The human was forcefully trying to curl up in on herself in some kind of ridiculous malformed ball of flesh, still floating in midair, with a dark blue halo flashing and trembling in the middle of her chest. Her shaking hands wrapped around her head and covered her ears, while her eyes were forcedly closed and tearing apart in weak cries slightly twinkling in the dim light.

For some strange reason, at this instant, Sans started to feel that something really was wrong; as if internally he knew that any other normal human was not meant to react that badly.

He had obviously meant to give her a scare; but given the type of human this was; given that even the dumbest of these players were able to predict any of the game’s characters’ behaviors at least to some extent, and given the incredibly exhaustive knowledge she herself had proven to hold… Shouldn’t she have expected him to react similarly to this? Shouldn’t she have seen this coming?

She had proven to be quite the sassy and resourceful kid, and a pretty observant one at that, easily to the point of actually becoming dangerous if she started jumping to conclusions and going back to that ‘paranoia mode’ of hers. Sure, he had seen her shaking and stuttering even during his first conversation with her, but even when her fear was obvious, he had simply assumed that she was the type of person who would sneakily bite back in the case of danger, just like what she had done the last time.

This radical change of behavior was deeply disconcerting, to say the least. He first tried to dismiss this impression as he reasoned that she was probably faking such over-the-top response so he would let his guard down and hesitate at the worst moment, if only for an instant— but the feeling would only get stronger the longer he was staring at this pitiful view, and the fact that her soul was plain visible and fully within his grasp only made her true feelings all the more obvious.

This was not the expression of a calculating liar crying crocodile tears.

“Put me down” she repeated again and again in a shaking and desperately imploring voice, “put me down, put-me-down please put-me-down _{ooh put-me-down-I’m-so-sorry-but-oh-my-God-put-me-down…}”

His eye-sockets closed as he sighed tensely. As much as he remained deeply annoyed by the time they were wasting, his anger was simply and effectively defeated by his surprise and confusion, and his hand carefully sent the crybaby back in place on the couch, before he released his grasp. Act or not, it was now definite that pushing her that way would lead nowhere. So much for trying to have her spill the beans.

For the next few seconds, he stood in front of her, waiting for the right moment to finally start explaining his plans or just begin an actual conversation… But the kid would not stop crying and shaking, even though he could tell that she was trying her best to calm down on her own.

… Well. That was awkward.

“uhh… ok, maybe i pushed it a bit too far, and i’m still a little mad at you for lying to me about this game thing… but that stuff doesn’t even matter in the end, so… i mean, uh, what with you knowing even more about the game than I do… i thought it was obvious that i was mostly messin’ with ya. _mostly.”

Yeah, it really wasn’t.

He watched as the fleshy ball kept trembling and sobbing for about one or two more minutes, and he eventually brought his rolling chair along as soon as his laziness told him that he was getting bored. He could hear the brat mutter distorted words sounding like some awkward apologies, but it took a while before she finally pulled her crimson head away from her arms and struggled to actually meet him in the eyes.

Or at least, she just tried to stare back at the pair of white glowing pellets glaring at her, given the fact that the only source of light available was once more only that of the little faraway torchlight, sitting on top of the desk located at least a dozen feet away from them. From that distance she could still somewhat imagine the skeleton’s outlines under the dim cold light, but it only sharpened his features through dancing ghastly reflections on his skull.

Once more, Sans was slightly taken aback for a half second upon seeing the expression on her face. If this wasn’t just some incredibly convincing act, then the genuine message it read was crystal clear:

For some reason, it almost appeared as if the mere fact of looking at him was actually painful.

He had seen fear. He knew what fear looked like.

This definitely was something else.

“… Sans.” was all she eventually managed to whisper in a broken voice that still somewhat struggled to hide her terror, to no avail.

“you’re still on to that?” he lifted his nonexistent eyebrows with a cynical mock-surprise. “i figured you’d have realized when you were hangin’ around in the air. or, uh. back to when we met around, what, an hour ago by now?”

She clumsily pushed her way back into the depths of the sofa (and almost lost her balance in the process), as she apparently tried to increase the distance between them as much as it was physically possible.

Then she looked down and trembled again.

“I-I really didn’t. S-sorry. I m-must’ve looked stupid…”

“pretty much.” he nodded in a mockingly solemn way.

The awkward silence resumed. He heard her sniffle and try to recompose herself, but it was obvious that she still looked deeply shaken. Sans thought about all the things he wanted to explain, but after a few more seconds…

He decided that maybe that could wait a little, as he gave in and sighed. Maybe they both needed a time-out, after all. There was so much a serious existential-crisis-inducing conversation could do, especially under such circumstances.

“… look. i get it, you know…? i took you from wherever you used to be and got you here while you never asked for anythin’, you had no idea that this game you used to play was actually alive or whatever…” He shrugged and took an audible, genuinely calm breath. “must be pretty freaky to have the truth hammered onto you like that. t’was hard for me, too.”

She slowly raised a pair of red swollen eyes towards him, silently watching him with a mixture between fear, sadness and… was this some actual, genuine compassion? He didn’t seem to be paying her any attention though, as he hardly gave her a glance, and sighed instead.

“but in the end, ok. maybe it wasn’t the same kind of shock. since, um,” he sent her an awkward grin and looked as if he was sincerely making a joke, “i’m not the one who used to take over a child’s body and slaughter everyone in sight literally because it’s a game and you’re doing it for fun. heh eh.”

The girl’s head was slowly buried in her arms as her cheeks reddened in embarrassment and guilt.

… Ouch. I never even played the game to begin with, but OUCH.

She was trying to take deep breaths, slowly taking in the consequences of these events.

Undertale was real. The Resets were real, if the video game she knew really was controlling this world. A Genocide Route had been attempted at some point and Sans remembered it. Did he remember it because he somehow could remember the Resets, or because it was the Route he had just been through? As far as the theories deduced, the actual canon game evidence pointed towards the fact that Sans could not remember the Resets, so…

She shivered. That only left them with the second option.

Sans had kidnapped her because she was about to play Undertale herself, so it meant that the Players were responsible for multiple bad things occurring in this world. Definitely the Resets. Maybe even more than ‘just’ that.

She lowered her eyes and buried a little more her head in her arms, deep in thought.

If she was getting things straight, then the most obvious part was that somehow, the game was real. It affected sentient people, and not just meaningless sprites and code with predetermined dialogues and actions to follow without any hint of actual individual thought into it.

The players were not toying with pixels, but with real lives. The reason why their dialogue could be always the same, yet so easily changed by the subtlest shifts in the player’s actions, was because they couldn’t remember the Resets, thus were prone to simply repeat their actions whenever time itself was rewound and they were confronted repeatedly to the same circumstances over and over.

It made no sense, but when facing this specific kind of context, it seemed to be the only thing that would make sense. Sans’s dialogue’ here sure was a lot more adaptable than in any regular simulation she could imagine, and he sure had felt physically tangible enough when he grabbed her that last time, thank you very much.

… And yet, there still was something that prevented this all from sounding truly real to her. She had entirely put aside the ‘dream’ option by now, but still— something was amiss.

For all she knew, the original video game made it clear that their lives were still led by numbers, and the fandom took it as canon too for the most part— because it was. It was canon that they were literally living in a video game. Monsters and humans alike had “LOVE” and “EXP”, their basic attacks followed predetermined patterns (it was canon that monsters could somehow be offered “patterns” as presents), their fights were turn-based and their actions were apparently confined within the sole limit of ‘their’ turn, and their physical abilities depended on statistics such as “HP”, “ATK” and “DEF.” A real world that truly made sense would not accept such things to develop alongside its regular laws of physics. Even just the Resets thing itself— she enjoyed sci-fi stories and theories, but for all she knew, time travel was just impossible.

So even if they were truly sentient and deserved basic respect and rights as real characters people, it didn’t necessarily make them physically real. Their world and its mechanics simply wouldn’t make sense otherwise, if it were just as real as her own.

In a way, it was… almost reassuring. This world wasn’t her own, but it was still a lot more predictable, and familiar. She would have to adjust to quite a few things of course, but logically, she should soon find her way through, right? Both this world and its inhabitants felt real, but she simply had to remember that they could not possibly be anything but some sort of virtual simulation, could they? Like in The Matrix! Yes. As realistic and sentient they would all seem, Sans and all the others just had to be some sorts of futuristic artificial intelligences. Very, very elaborate and actually sentient artificial intelligences apparently able to feel actual emotions and having real virtual lives and families and human (?) moralities. Hahahahaha.

That wouldn’t prevent her from treating them like fully real people of course, because even if they weren’t real according to the physical aspect, they still were on the ethical one— and thus, they certainly didn’t deserve to go through all that mess the video game and its players apparently put on them.

… That still was one heck of a messed up situation.

Which led her to wonder… How had he reacted, upon learning by himself that his world wasn’t real? How had he managed to bring someone real on the physical plane inside a (supposedly?) virtual place? Was it just like in the movie The Matrix, and this body she was controlling right now and that looked like her own was, in fact, nothing more than a part of the simulation itself?

That might explain some things, maybe, like how Sans was able to… Had he turned her “SOUL” blue?

Whatever was that thing that she could feel beating at a steady rate inside her chest (and that didn’t actually feel like her regular heart), it sure had never been there before. It had never made itself known, at least. It had to be specific to this ‘virtual body’ she must have gained upon arriving in this virtual world… Now that she was thinking about it, she wondered what her in-game stats could be. After all, if she now had a SOUL in the Undertale meaning of the word, then it had to mean that she had her own stats as well, right? Would she have 20 HP too?

She tried not to think too hard about it. Thinking about HP made her think about taking damage and facing game overs, and she really didn’t look forward to that possibility.

Then again… Why had she been brought here? Her being in this world meant that Sans had found a plan in order to solve his problems, and that he was about to put it to motion. And she probably was expected to have some sort of role to play in it, too.

Then again… Sans? Sans was the one who gave up so long ago… What made things so different this time? What happened to his legendary laziness? Did it go on a vacation or something?

“… still.” he eventually added, sighing tiredly. “i was just thinkin’. it would’ve been nice if you could. y’know. at least admit what you did. and not just pretend you never played the game or whatever.”

His tone did not sound particularly grave, but the serious look in his empty eye-sockets was talkative enough on its own. The human only gave him a pair of confused eyes in response, frowning in a puzzled pout. He didn’t really seem to care, as if he were certain that against what her body language said, she knew exactly what he was talking about.

“i mean, i know you didn’t really do it on purpose. i’m not actually blamin’ you for anything, ‘cause i’m pretty sure you wouldn’t’ve done it if you knew you were hurtin’ real people. but that still happened. so… i really just expected at least a ‘sorry’ or somethin’. y’know. for courtesy.”

“Wait… W-when you said I was lying, you thought…” Her face blanched as she started to feel nauseated. “B-but that wasn’t a lie, I swear! It really was—”

“kid, if you wanted to convince me that you really never did anything wrong, you should’ve tried harder than that.”

She sent him a persistent and bewildered blank look.

After a few seconds during which they simply held that staring contest as if their silence could bend the argument in their favor, Sans eventually gave in. Why did all humans always have to be so unanimously determined even when there was no point to it whatsoever?

“ok, let me put it down more clearly for you.” he eventually sighed in defeat, rolling his eyes in annoyance and slowly standing up as he started walking towards his desk. “y’see, the way i brought you here? ‘f course it was related to the game so i could find your computer’s coordinates. but that’s not all. i wanted to avoid some kinds of accidents, y’see, like inadvertently taking someone who was playing for the first time and had no idea what this whole mess was about, besides not having done anything to us yet. that wouldn’t’ve been fair.” he shrugged heavily. “so i’d made sure that the player i’d get would be someone who was about to start a very specific type of run. one that newcomers aren’t supposed to play or even know about.” His white pupils pierced her like daggers as he narrowed his eye-sockets. “if you’re here, it means you know exactly WHICH run i’m talking about. Since it’s the one you were about to go through.”

She realized that she did. As she tried to imagine how he could have used specific programming-related triggers to select his target, and as she remembered that she had been kidnapped before she had even been given the chance to take any action whatsoever in the game, she realized that the best way to actually create a trigger was to choose something that was constant in the game, and that could only occur in a very limited number of ways.

For example: naming the Fallen Human.

No matter the name given, anyone could go through the same diversity of choices. All names could lead to either Pacifist or Genocide routes, without excluding any of the Neutrals that went in-between. Sans couldn’t possibly predict that a player would automatically go through one route or another before they even had time to meet the first monster in the game.

However… there was a very special name that led to very special consequences.

“so let me recap.” he continued. “you show some extensive knowledge about the game’s details that even i had no idea about, you try to play the game on hard mode, and when you arrive here you have the gall to tell me that you NEVER played before because you SUCK at video games? you must really have some nerve to keep pretending your story makes any sense whatsoever by now.”

She opened her mouth to object. She left it open for a second or two, but no sound came out. Her eyes gradually lowered as her lips slowly closed and pursed in an embarrassed pout.

“… O-okay, w-when you put it like that I see what you mean.” She gulped. He was mad, she could tell. What would happen if he was mad? Would he attack again? She panicked. “B-but look, I swear I didn’t…! uh…”

“kid. stop. you’re just embarrassing yourself, now.” He sounded like he was grinding his teeth again. “trust me, i’m trying REALLY hard to not get mad at you ‘cause i know it’s pointless, but you’re NOT making it easy.”

… Of course he wouldn’t trust her. He had made his point clear, after all. He could joke, but he was also a very rational and analytical guy when it came to his thinking. She reasoned that in his place, she probably would have gone through a similar conclusion herself.

And yet he was wrong. Not because there was a flaw in his deduction. But because he simply lacked some pieces of evidence that completely changed the story. This situation made her think back of her best friend’s absolute favorite video game, where evidence was everything and even the smallest detail could turn the situation around in an instant. Could she do something similar? Was there anything around her that could prove her claims?

She realized that there was. She did have her cell phone with her. Didn’t she? She discreetly slid her hand in her jeans’ back pocket. It was there. A sigh of relief escaped her, although it didn’t leave her any less tense.

She raised a determined look back at him. Although her shivers went back as soon as her eyes caught sight of his face again, she tried to maintain her stance for as long as she could manage.

This was Sans. He was scary, but he was alive, and even if he was mad, she knew him pretty well. Maybe even more than himself to some extent…? She did not want to think too much about that part.

“I… L-look, I sup-pose you r-really don’t t-trust me, but…” She gulped and forcedly closed her eyes, clenching her fists. “If I can prove it. Will you listen?”

He raised a nonexistent eyebrow in what appeared to be confusion and surprise. Under different circumstances, it could have seemed like he looked actually amused, but this time he probably was just even more annoyed.

After a few more seconds of looking at her up and down, studying her every details as if he were looking for evidence in her demeanor that she was playing him again, he appeared to give in once more.

“… heh. why the heck not. maybe you’ll get a laugh outta me if you’re good.” But then he widened his sockets and his white glowing pupils disappeared. “You’d better not be wasting my time, though.” Of course he’d want to pull that one to intimidate her and of course she had seen it coming but of course it was extremely effective nonetheless.

His pupils came back immediately, even though he still looked deeply annoyed. He was supposed to look much less scary that way, but somehow it didn’t stop her shivers and she had to force her eyes closed and steady herself in order to try to regain her calm.

He crossed his arms in contempt and flumped down in his chair. The sudden motion made its little wheels reel back a few feet away, but he quickly stopped it by stomping his foot on the ground and he grunted quietly in response, mumbling curses against the laws of conservation of kinetic energy. His eyes went from staring at the floor with irritation to focusing on her face, sending her a death glare.

“humor me.”

His impatient and menacing tone showed that she would definitely not be given a second chance. In fact, she understood that she should feel extremely lucky she had even been given a single chance at all. And her time was already running out.

While she would have preferred having been graced with at least a few more seconds of reflection under other circumstances so she could fully prepare her actions and better calculate the results, it felt obvious that pushing her luck would have been suicidal (she did not want to know whether she should have meant it in a metaphorical or literal way).

So she immediately reached for her phone and pulled it out, quickly turning it on and opening one of its applications. After a few calculated movements of her thumb over the screen, she shakily rose up from the sofa and extended her arm as far as it could stretch, handing her little device for the skeleton to see. For the first few seconds, he refused to move and looked at her in an apathetic manner; but he quickly seemed to ponder his options and eventually decided to take it. Maybe because he would take it as a chance to mess with it or find some information regarding humans or her world, she realized.

… He still looked unimpressed, though.

“what am i looking at?”

“It’s. I-it’s my phone.”

Sans stared with some suddenly renewed interest at the little object he was keeping between his left bony fingers, turning it around and looking at it through various angles.

“that looks… pretty different from the phones i know. huh.” He played a bit more with it, weighing it in his palm and looking at its white back. “_{hm. fancy.}”

“Y-yeah, it’s a p-pretty common model where I come from…” she rambled uneasily, laughing awkwardly and rubbing her arms. “I-I guess that when you… I-I mean, uh. It just, must’ve come with me. I suppose. Since I… always keep it around me at all times.”

He nodded and hummed again, absorbed in his thoughts as if he were contemplating what possibilities this tiny piece of technology could bring him. Still, he quickly lowered his hand on his lap and went back to glare at her warily.

“anyway. what’s it supposed to prove exactly?”

“I-it’s on the app.” she explained. “It’s a conversation I had with my friends. R-right before you… b-before I arrived here.”

His eye-sockets twitched, but he quickly gave another glance at the phone’s screen and saw words and lots of colors and images. Yep, it looked pretty much like some sort of chatroom.

She was still standing between the couch and his chair, but now she started regretting that she was not back to sitting on it. Part of her wanted to sink into it and become one with the furniture so she could stop feeling so anxious and cold.

Usually she was one of the most patient people her friends and relatives knew; but one thing that could break that patience was dread. When she could feel that her fate could very well depend on how he was about to interpret her arguments, she rationalized that she had no other choice but to at least try to actively plead for her cause.

“L-look… Full story is, it was a bet. Okay? It was j-just a joke between my friends, and it’s been going on for months. At first I never even wanted to play! I mean, I wasn’t completely against the idea b-but I just thought it wasn’t w-worth trying, so… It’s just th-that today my best friend found a way to make me, and…”

Sans kept flipping through the messages, hardly listening to her. He was completely still. If it weren’t for his left thumb brushing the screen from time to time, he just might have been mistaken for a statue.

@BlueDoppler: This is FINALLY happening, guys. I’m not even kidding.

@Calliope Quill: Now I’m the lost one. What have we been apparently ”hyping” for exactly?

@BlueDoppler: Dawn. She’s finally doing it.

He carried on brushing through the screen. He wondered how that technology could work, that was truly fascinating. Monsterkind had only ever known phones with actual buttons, so the concept of the screen being a unique yet ever-changing button all by itself was a complete novelty to him. He would have been interested in potentially opening that thing and observing how things worked inside of it.

Alphys would probably have been even more interested than he already was. She would probably be obsessed over it for a few days. Find magical adaptations to that human technology in order to improve the daily life in the Underground or something.

“It r-really wasn’t that bad at first. It was just a joke between us because, we’ve been friends for months, and we talked about Undertale almost all the time, and they were all like, ‘You can’t be a real Undertale fan if you don’t play’, and I kept refusing to play for the sake of the joke, so, at some point… It had just become some silly game between us, and the first one who’d manage to make me play would win something or whatever. But Lys…”

@WinDows Gulim: Oh Glob, I’m so proud of you right now. How did you do it?

@BlueDoppler: Sometimes blackmail is for the greater good =)

The human had started to pace awkwardly in the room. He raised a bit his skull back towards her, still with a tense look, although this time it was for a different reason.

He did just read the word “blackmail”, in a completely casual conversation at that. She had said that the people hiding behind these logs were her friends, and the context did make it sound like it was just meant to be taken as a joke — and the human he had right in front of him seemed to have taken it as a joke as well, at first. But… maybe “blackmail” wasn’t something to take so lightly when it could have such unexpected yet serious consequences.

“S-she cheated. So I didn’t want to play by the rules either. I was about to get my butt kicked anyway as soon as I’d start playing, so I just thought, why not give them exactly what they want, right? I wanted to keep the Hard Mode as a surprise and see how long it’d take them to notice. I-I mean they didn’t want me to actually play the game because we already all knew what the story was all about, we all just wanted to have a good laugh together, so I-I thought— I just th-thought I’d give them a good show, okay…?”

@Pineapplup: … °sigh° I guess I don’t have a choice uh.

@Yoshua: no u don’t :p

She had ended up as his target because of a stupid teenager game. Not even because she had wanted to play Undertale on her own volition. Well, she had admitted that maybe she had wanted to give it a try herself at some point, and maybe she would have played under other conditions, but… She did tell him the truth.

Sans lowered the phone and raised his skull to look at her. She looked like she was trying to keep her composure and her pacing act had surely been an attempt from her to control her anxiousness by releasing its energy in one form or another, but her entire body was shaking and her eyes were getting watery again. She looked like she was certain he wasn’t listening to her. Or caring to listen. Whoops.

“… you gotta be kiddin.” he eventually whispered, face-palming and muffling some embarrassed laugh.

She jumped at the sound of his voice, and her shaky legs almost seemed to give in for a second.

Wow, he really had given her a much more serious scare than he had anticipated, hadn’t he…?

She turned towards him quickly, pivoting on her feet in one swift movement, although it was more because of a feeling of dread rather than an actual voluntary effect from her part. She looked like she could hardly believe what she had heard, and was now staring at him just to make sure that she hadn’t dreamed. He gave her a sheepish grin.

“ok. wow. i uh… wasn’t expectin that. never thought that sort of thing could… what even are the odds?”

“I-I know, right…?” she laughed in bewilderment. This was surreal. Maybe she had fainted again and this was all just a dream.

“well. uh.” He stared down at her phone and realized that he was still holding on to it. He also realized that he might have scrolled a little too far through the chat, because the application had seemed to freeze as it showed an error message. Something about not having any Wi-Fi connection available. Sighing, he quickly raised his arm towards her. “here. you might want that back.”

She merely stared at his hand in disbelief. When she noticed he wasn’t moving, she realized that he actually expected her to take it. So she swiftly raised a shaking arm and seized it by a corner between two fingers, then retracted her arm twice as fast.

“Yeah… Big misunderstanding, huh…?” she laughed awkwardly, looking away.

“… yeah. sorry.” He sighed again, looking away as well. “i thought the only type of person who’d have any interest in lying to me about ever playin the game were the ones who did… real bad things when they were in control. so i just… assumed that you were one of them.”

… So that’s what that was all about.

He thought she had gone through the Genocide Run and that she had tried to lie to him in order to evade the guilt of having murdered everyone.

Maybe he had thought that she was responsible for the timeline they were in right at the moment, if her hypothesis that they were currently stuck in the aftermath of a (failed) Genocide Run was true.

Maybe he even had thought that her denying that he could possibly be real had just been another act from her part and that she had known all along and just tried to… whatever it was he had thought her motives for doing something so stupid could have been.

No wonder he had been so mad!

“so. uh… i guess i should be the one to apologize now? ‘specially for earlier…”

“D-don’t worry about it.” she muttered by reflex. “I understand. I’m. Just glad that’s settled.”

“heh… if you say so.” He paused for a small moment, looking to the side; but after a split second, he gave her a dorky grin. “uh… h-how about we start over and pretend this never happened?”

She saw a bony hand raise towards her in a jolt, and she shivered. She stared at it for a few seconds, before shaking herself out of her trance and staring at him instead.

He saw her timidly raise her left arm to shake his, but her hand was quaking and he was certain her face wasn’t supposed to look that white. Instead of shaking his hand in return though, she suddenly retracted hers and rolled it around her legs, burying her head between her knees.

“I’d like that.” She smiled shyly and gave him a weak and sheepish glance, but her tone was genuine.

Sans watched her behavior with a puzzled look, but he simply shrugged and brought his arm back onto his lap with a light chuckle. Was she shy or scared that he’d pull the whoopee cushion prank?

“I’m, uh. Dawn, by the way.”

“yeah, they mentioned your name on that thing.” he nodded vaguely. “i would introduce myself too, but… you know how it is.”

They both laughed. Then stopped. That was awkward.

The human lowered her gaze, resting her chin on her knees and wrapping her arms around them. Sans saw her send him some quick glances, but she would never speak up. At some point he tried to encourage her to say what she had in mind, and although she seemed reluctant, she eventually gulped and sent him a sad and empathetic look.

“I was wondering… For how long have you known…?”

“about the game? well…” He sighed deeply, staring at the void. “it’s hard to keep track of time from this side, y’know, so i don’t think i could give you a real answer. still, i really found out that you guys existed pretty recently, i’ll admit…” he shrugged.

She looked down.

“but, uh, when you see that time keeps jumpin’ back and forth and that the only thing that changes between loops is that the kid does some weird new stuff every time, it’s not too hard to figure that something’s not right with’em. that something… took over at some point.” A stiff chuckle burst from him, but it was quickly silenced. “y’know, it would’ve been much faster if the game weren’t erasing most of my research every time one of you wanted to play. it gets old to try to keep up and redo everything from scratch. makes you want to just give up after a certain point.”

Yeah… That part wasn’t really new, but there still was a huge difference between thinking of it as a fictional character’s depressing demise nobody could do anything about, and… actually facing said fictional character voicing this very same situation.

“… Wait a minute.” She gave him a shocked and desperately horrified look. “Are y-you implying that you can remember the Resets?”

“the what?” He raised a non-existent eyebrow in intense confusion. The befuddled face she made probably made him realize that she actually expected him to know, so he thought a little more about it. “oh… wait. did you mean ‘time jump’? t-that’s how we’ve been callin’ them down here, heh eh.”

She blinked in deep puzzlement. That was… new.

Then again, she didn’t specifically remember the word ‘Reset’ having been used in the game at any other point than the main menu or Flowey’s dialogue, so maybe she was just influenced by headcanons and alternate versions. She hadn’t watched an actual playthrough in a while, so her memory was fuzzy when it came to telling apart ‘canon’ and ‘fanon’ regarding such minor details in terminology.

“Well, uh… Y-yeah. That’s how we refer to it in the game, and, i-in general too. It’s a ‘Reset’ when you restart the game from the beginning, and it’s a ‘Reload’ if you go back to the last SAVE file, but don’t actually erase all of your progress in the game.”

“… that does make it sound like it’s a video game thing alright. yikes.”

Maybe that explained why they wouldn’t have thought of using such term, or even been reluctant to, if they ever considered the option. Since, under their perspective, it wasn’t a video game. Ugh…

“anyway, to answer your question… yeah. not always been the case, but at some point i managed to manually save my memories, so now i keep’em every time there’s a, uh, ‘reset’, as you say.”

“The game…” She stopped there and bit her lip, looking down. But when Sans gave her a silent nod to ask her to continue, she took a short breath. “The game made it look like you couldn’t remember. I just… I had no idea. We had no idea that this was…”

He had been trapped all this time. She used to think that all these scenarios where he would keep track of everything and never be happy because of old memories and traumatisms were just the material of fanfiction and drama-inducing stories the fandom had made up, but…

The worst part was. Since nobody had ever noticed him going off script at any point. Was he just… literally playing his part over and over? Why? Was he afraid of what would happen to him if the ‘Anomaly’ realized that he was out of the loop? She did remember having read a few stories where Sans was given even more attention and misery on purpose, just because he could remember everything but couldn’t do anything… Was that it?

This only made her feel even sadder for him, because she was certain that if he had gone off-script and that anyone noticed… This would have had much bigger consequences than he could imagine, that much was true; but she was convinced that instead of leading to consequences against him… It would only have made the players realize sooner. Maybe his situation could have been solved earlier if he had just… let them know.

But then again… How could he have given them any trust at all, after what they had done?

“heh… don’t worry about it. i mean, ok that sucked more than you could imagine. but… it’ll be over soon, now. that’s why i brought you here.”

Right. He had a plan. And the plan involved using a ‘player’ to some extent… What for, though? He had yet to say anything about it, he hadn’t even gotten started or looked in any rush… Could his plan be already foiled since he discovered that she had never played? No, no, he just said that he was confident he could still end the problem. But then again… what was his plan? Did it have something to do with her being now a part of the game and getting her own in-game ‘SOUL’ and game stats…? Wait, was that it? Did he want to do something with her soul?

Maybe she had appeared to become a little too nervous or even fearful, because the skeleton continued, this time in a much more anxious tone:

“whoa hey, don’t start gettin’ the wrong idea.” He had immediately raised his hands in defense and tried to wave them in a pacifying way. He took a short break, then lowered them and laid them on his lap, as he slightly bent forward and smiled slightly. “this isn’t for revenge or anythin’, if that’s what you were worried about. i specifically needed one of you to be here for my plan, but you’ll get to go back safe and sound as soon as i’m done. promise.”

She blinked in confusion. That was… reassuring? Well, she hadn’t exactly thought he would have spent too much effort in bringing a player if it were just for the sake of getting his revenge, but still, she hadn’t exactly expected him to bring her just for chats either. Neither had she expected him to be so… calm about all this mess.

And she certainly hadn’t expected him to promise anything to someone he had literally just met. That could only mean that he was dead serious with this, but… wow. He really must be pretty confident of his plan, at this point. Which was a sign of great news, she reasoned.

“You’re…” She discreetly shook her head so she could put her thoughts back in order. “I’m just… surprised? Happy? Confused? I-I don’t know. You s-seem to be taking it so well… I m-mean, you’re not mad about all this? Not even a little?”

“nah… that’s not really my thing.” He just shrugged. Of course. “i mean, uh. as long as nobody blatantly takes me for an idiot and shakes the guilt of accidentally murderin’ people like if it didn’ matter to them, that is.” His eye-sockets twitched in a funny way and he raised a sheepish grin. “s-sorry again for jumpin to conclusions.”

“Again, no worries.” she muttered with a shy strained smile, looking down.

“so, uh… i guess i was a bit mad when i figured that i had not just one sicko to look out for but, like, a few thousands or something. but… actually? when i saw that you literally had no idea what was going on… it became pretty hard to be mad at any of you.”

His left hand went in the back of his skull and scratched his neck. The rattling sound made her shiver again and she forcefully closed her eyes and turned her head away.

“i mean, if you were just thinking that none of it was real and that you weren’t hurting anybody, then… heh. it just meant that no matter how bad things went down here… nobody was crazy enough to actually do it on purpose, y’know?”

He was smiling. It looked sad, but it also was a… strangely serene smile. He almost looked… actually relieved?

Nonetheless, she simply could not return the same expression. Part of her wanted to stop beating herself up about it because she had not actively contributed to his misery and because he was saying himself that it was over, so she feared that countering his opinion or even just talking too much about this topic could break this incongruous serenity of his and bring him back to a storm of feelings and all the potential trauma he had been through… But all at the same time, she simply could hardly understand how he had ever managed to reach this state of peace in the first place.

She was no psychologist, but… she was not sure whether or not it was healthy for him.

Besides, as far as she knew, it could just be a mask, whether he wanted to fool the others or himself.

Either way… this wouldn’t be the first time.

“anyway. i guess you’re still wonderin’ what you’re doin here.” he said, as if he just remembered that he had somewhat forgotten to answer this question… or as if he just wanted to close their previous conversation and clumsily brushed the subject aside. “might be time to actually answer that. heh.”

“You want to stop the Players from accessing the game… Right?”

He seemed surprised by her deduction, but soon his smile expanded ever so slightly and she heard a forced chuckle. He seemed impressed? He had complimented her over her observation skills, but it didn’t quite fit with his tone…

Oh, wait. Maybe he was just taken aback by how she had predicted him so easily.

When she realized just how self-conscious he had to be since he knew just how much she knew about the game and himself, Dawn bit her tongue. Maybe she should watch her words and try to stop anticipating his actions every now and again. That was creepy.

“i… i want to stop your actions in the game from interfering here at least, that much’s for sure. i don’t know what consequences there’d be for your game, but, uh… sorry, i just really don’t care about that part. heh.”

Yeah, she couldn’t exactly blame him for that. If the game became unusable due to his plan, the Undertale fandom would whine about it for a while, but they would live.

She vastly preferred taking a toy away from them rather than endangering actual lives.

“anyway. that’s exactly what bringin’ you here was supposed to do.”

“Yeah…? That’s the part I don’t exactly understand here.” she muttered uneasily. “I want to help, of course, but… What do you want me to do, exactly?”

“well, the principle is that, as one of those players… now that you’re here, you have the possibility to control the timeline however you want. basically.”

“W-we can only do that by pressing the game’s buttons though,” she replied anxiously. Did he expect her to have that ability naturally? “I don’t think I could do any of that without having access to the—”

“the game’s not the problem. at least, not anymore.” he countered, shaking his skull calmly and smirking confidently while staring intently at her.

She stared back with a blank look. She was not sure she really followed what he was implying here. She would know if she just happened to have the magical ability to randomly warp time into infinite loops, wouldn’t she? And there was no way she would just like that develop that power out of nowhere… Right?

Wait. If she was a player, and if she thought again of all this Matrix logic… If he had arranged everything to bring her here, he could probably have ‘programmed’ her stats however he wanted. So maybe he just gave her that ability literally by typing numbers on a keyboard or something…?

“you know what makes human souls so special, don’t you?” He had uttered this as a regular question, even if he explicitly stated that he knew the answer. Still, he continued: “determination. and let’s say that yours, along with any of the other players, is much stronger than the average around here.”

… Oooor that. That could work too. It all came down to ‘determination’, then…? Huh. Well she was a human, so of course she was expected to have that to some extent according to the game’s lore.

“so now that you’re in a world where your soul has an actual physicality…” His look intensified, as he glared at her and made sure to catch her full attention. “you should be strong enough to steal power from the game itself.”

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“so now that you’re in a world where your soul has an actual physicality… you should be strong enough to steal power from the game itself.”

She gasped in silence, but then kept this air inside of her lungs as she found herself unable to release it. Everything had seemed to fall into place, to such extent and at such velocity, she started to feel nauseated.

After a few seconds though, she slowly calmed down… and suddenly she repressed a burst of cynical laughter. Of course not, there simply was no way. She would never be determined enough. Not her. He would never make her buy that one. Hilarious. What made him think that?

He seemed to be completely certain of what he was saying, so she was willing to believe him; but the mere idea of thinking of herself as ‘determined’ felt… strange. She could stand her ground when necessary, but… that was pretty much it. She was nowhere as determined as what the game seemed to define the word as.

“I… wow.”

She took a few seconds to blink repeatedly and try to put her thoughts back in order. She was particularly curious to learn how he could have learned about the power of a ‘player’s’ soul without having ever seen one before.

Alphys had needed to see human souls directly in order to learn just about the existence of determination, so… How did he do it without even having any player anywhere near? As far as she knew, he definitely hadn’t kidnapped anyone else before her in order to dissect their soul. Just the thought of such thing made her feel sick. Good thing she really couldn’t figure him doing anything like this.

“So… I can Reset. Okay.” She still needed to hear herself say it in order to fully believe it, although she kept lowering her head and blinking at the void. “But… What’s the next step? Why did you, uh… ‘give’ me that power to begin with?”

She heard him chuckle again: apparently, it pleased him to have her ask so many questions. He turned his skull and used it to point towards the end of the room, but before he could say anything, he seemed to realize that since the basement was still stuck in the dark, they could not see what he was trying to point.

“… hm. does the, ah, ‘game’, tell you anything about an old machine that’s supposed to be in this room?”

“Oh! You mean you’re going to fix it?” she deduced.

She had no idea which theories were true about what this machine was about and all the potential links they had found, but… Part of her guiltily thought that she finally had the chance to actually learn the truth.

From Sans himself, at that! As much as she tried to tone down her enthusiasm for his sake, it was just undeniable that this was incredibly cool.

“well… yeah. that’s the plan.”

He scratched the back of his spine in embarrassment again and the rattling sound made her shiver again. Whoops. She really should learn to hold her tongue, dang it…

She heard a deep inhale, then a sigh. Was he doing it just for show, or…? She had trouble imagining how a skeleton could possibly breathe. The fandom had made a lot of headcanons about how the skeleton biology could work, but whenever things like this were mentioned in the game, it was made clear that skeletons just… didn’t have any of these things at all.

When Sans continued his explanations, once again he sounded much more serious.

“basically, this machine was built so that, if it’s given enough power, it can control the timeline. that means it offers the possibility to go back in time whenever we program it, and it’s even able to bring stuff and people along with it.” She saw him slightly hang his skull and look to the side. “but, eh, you’d think that after so many time travels, that’s not really the part i’m focusing on.”

The contrary would have surprised her. If all he wanted was a Reset, since he had already been through all the trouble to bring her here to begin with, he could have just asked her to do it for him. But yeah, apparently that sounded like the thing he wanted to avoid… After all, it was beyond obvious that these time shenanigans had already ruined his life countless times.

“So what else can it do…?” If it wasn’t this specific ability he was interested in, it had to be another.

“it’s the same ability as anyone who’s in charge of the timeline. and it’s the same reason why i brought you here.” She perked her head up in surprise at that last sentence. “if you’re the ‘most determined’ thing or being in the universe at a given time, it doesn’t only mean that you can control the timeline. it also means that you stop everyone else from doing so.”

… Oh. So that was what her role was about.

She was the shield. A Reset-proof living barrier.

“You mean that as long as I’m here, nobody can Reset the game.”

“exactly. best thing is, you’re already doing it right now. just by standing here. even if you’re doing nothing, you’re still contributing. ‘sides, i specifically need you to stay alive and in good shape for this to work, so it’s to everyone’s benefit, right?” he smiled. “theoretically i guess keepin’ you here forever should be enough to do the trick, but, eh, i’m sure you want to go home. so that’s why fixin’ the machine will be a more permanent solution.”

He chuckled at that, but it sounded a little more awkward than the previous times. She decided to just shrug jokingly and give him a patient smile.

“so… the plan was to get you here, fix the machine, send you back, and then go back for the last time ever and get us all to the surface.” he concluded.

She nodded and hummed in both understanding and admiration. It was a simple plan, but she didn’t see any obvious flaw in its simplicity. Well, apart from the part where they would have to actually fix the machine, but since Sans said it had been fully functional at some point, why wouldn’t they succeed again?

She believed in his plan. It might take a while to actually reach the last step; but they would succeed, and they would bring everyone the Happy Ending they deserved.

“anyway, uh…” He now seemed back to his friendly and slightly dorky side, although he appeared a little… tense? Anxious? “i hope i can trust you not to do anything stupid with your time powers, now.”

“Of course not!” She seemed almost offended he could even think of bringing up the subject, but she might have expressed her thoughts a little too indignantly when she saw him stiffen and sink a little in his chair. She immediately cowered back in the sofa. “I-I mean, uhh, even if I wanted to Reset or something like that, I don’t even know how that’s supposed to work from here. So, either way, I’m positive you have nothing to worry about.”

“… heh. right.” He had appeared to squint his eye-sockets in an indecipherable manner. He didn’t seem to distrust her anymore, but… apparently, he still found the need to add a small precision: “i mean, even if you did that, that’d be pretty stupid. if you erase this timeline, you’ll erase your ride home too, so… i wouldn’t do that if i were you.”

… Right. That too. She still had no idea how he had brought her inside the game, but she was certain that it involved a device that had not always been available to him, and it had probably taken him a while to build it in the first place.

A heavy silence fell, during which she tried to process everything that had been said so far. It appeared to her as simple and logical, but… if only on the emotional side, that was already a lot more to take in. There were so many implications to the game being real, and…

“I… I had another question.” She hesitated again, but once again Sans gestured her to continue with a calm nod. “How did you figure out all this?”

The dorky cheerfulness in his pupils seemed to fade instantly. They wandered around for a few seconds as she heard him take another deep breath, but he quickly answered nonetheless.

“let’s… say that’s the tricky part.” he chuckled tensely, as he seemed to be avoiding her look. “that’s some kind of work i started in a previous timeline and… somehow, i don’t remember the details of how i came across those discoveries for the first time. those plans just happened to survive the last time jumps. my computer here can still ‘save’ virtual data, like blueprints or… well, that’s also what i use to save my memory, actually; so that’s where i eventually found the plans too.”

He decided against saying it out loud because he didn’t want her to worry and go back to her paranoia mode from earlier, but… He had to admit, that was suspicious. It was pretty fishy that some data from a certain timeline could have been saved, while some other data from the exact same timeline — say, his memory — had not been retained for some reason, by the very same device that was supposed to save both without making any difference.

Now that he could stop worrying about having his work potentially erased due to time being rewound without warning, and now that he could actually focus his energy and thought on basically anything else…

That was fishy. That was extremely fishy.

“they do look really familiar, and that old thing only responds to my magic signature, so i’m sure i’m the only one who could’ve possibly done the calculations and the spectrum measures at some point anyway. but as for the details of how i got the idea to make THAT kind of measures in the first place… sorry, can’t help ya.” He gave her a half-reassured look and added: “don’t worry though, i redid them all just in case, during this timeline, and i got the same results. i mean… you’d figure i wouldn’t accept that the anomaly comes from a video game unless i got some REAL proof, right…?”

For the first time, Dawn actually started to doubt him. She felt like he was hiding something from her, and yet this ‘thing’ he was hiding from her was not so hard to figure out. What he had just said was not making much sense; she didn’t know how this ‘saving’ thing worked at all, so maybe the contradiction she saw was simply due to a similar misunderstanding to the one during which Sans believed she had lied to him, but…

He knew how the full mechanisms worked, and he was finding this suspicious too. Had it been… dangerous to bring her here without having solved this contradiction first?

Some people are just too smart for their own good.

She seemed on the verge of asking him for further details and explanations, but an unexpected event stopped her before she even had the time to open her mouth.

The neon lights on the ceiling started flickering, and after a few seconds, they remained lit.

They both stared at the ceiling in surprise for a short moment, but the monster was the first to properly react. Then again, although a relieved wide grin appeared on his face, he didn’t turn his gaze away from the lights.

“finally. they really got me worried there.”

The human directed a pair of confused eyes towards him— and they instantly froze in place.

This was the first time she actually could see him fully, in all his real details, under a full light. She… wasn’t certain of what she had been expecting, really. He didn’t look nearly as terrifying as he did before when they were both stuck in the dark; nonetheless, this sight was… puzzling.

Somehow, although she thought she should have been prepared for this by now, seeing a skeleton moving fully on its own was still quite a shock; and now that she could see all of his subtle movements with an enhanced precision, the contrast between the life that was so obviously infused in him and the so obviously non-organic bones…

The strangest part was the fact that she simply couldn’t tell whether these bones were solid or not; it was almost as if their texture changed constantly depending on whether he wanted them to move or not… Was that how magic bodies worked? Purely through the monster’s intent? Given the fact that the game said their bodies were attuned to their souls, maybe that was literally it.

Still, she just… couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that his skull looked like hard, solid bone, and yet he could shift its shape just however he wanted it, somehow. And wait, it looked like his chest was rising and falling— was he actually breathing? How?! He didn’t have lungs, did he…?

“you okay there, bud?”

She jerked awake from her trance and felt her cheeks start to slowly redden in embarrassment. Of course he had caught her staring.

“S-sorry. I was just…” Okay she really didn’t want to bring that sort of uncomfortable topic. She decided she should instead change the subject and pointed towards the ceiling. “What just happened?”

“i guess alphys finally managed to reboot the core. i, uh… i think i maaaaay have overloaded it pretty badly when i used my machine to bring you here. got me worried for a while that, uh… the damage might’ve been too serious and it could’ve… well. let’s just say we’re lucky that didn’t happen.”

… Yikes. So it wasn’t just a local blackout. He had caused a nationwide power outage just by kidnapping her. Wow.

Sans stood up from his chair, then walked towards his desk. After turning off the now useless desk lamp, he started arranging a few papers into piles, went to check how badly his computer had taken the shutdown, sighed in relief at some point— it looked like nothing too bad had happened to its system or files, fortunately. When she remembered that he had said this was the same device responsible for keeping his data and memory safe throughout the Resets, she felt all the more relieved for him.

She hesitated at first, but when curiosity won over her nervousness, she eventually stood up herself and quietly walked towards the desk, observing from afar.

“Can I help with something?” He blinked in surprise, then turned his skull towards her with two wide perplexed pellets.

“oh, you’re…” He stopped himself before he could say the legendary ‘still here?’ and completely sound like the dorky scientist cliché, as he suddenly felt self-conscious and stupid. Of course, where else would she have gone anyway? So instead, he added: “nah, don’t worry, i got this. don’t think you could help with much anyway. you wouldn’t happen to have a degree in magic entanglement physics, would you?”

“No, not really…” She knew he had meant it as a joke, yet she looked down in shame and disappointment.

“i mean. magic isn’t even supposed to be a thing where you come from. right?” She wanted to ask him how he could even know that to begin with, but he wasn’t looking at her, so he completely ignored her startled look. “you know, it’s… funny. you’re taking all this a lot better than i expected. well, not that i’m gonna complain ‘bout that.”

“I’m… pretty much just doing my best not to freak out right now.” she laughed meekly with a strained smirk. “But seriously, if there’s something I can do, don’t hesitate to tell me. I know I can’t exactly make calculations like you and I’d understand if you didn’t want to see me anywhere near your machine, but…”

“you can keep chattin’ if you want. doesn’t bother me.” he chuckled sincerely. He couldn’t help but sigh and add in a melancholic yet hopeful mutter: “it’s… nice to finally have a real chat, for a change.”

Oh crap. He had sounded almost happy when saying that, but it only made the realization all the more heartbreaking when it struck.

Ever since the beginning, he had been stuck in numerous time loops during which he was the only one ever remembering that anything was wrong, and worst of all, he had forced himself to keep the act no matter what. He must have been so lonely and hopeless…

No wonder having someone completely new around him, someone who could also empathize with his situation if ever so slightly, had such surprising effect on him. She was finally starting to better understand why he had become so chatty and friendly all of a sudden.

At first, she had assumed that he was just keeping the attitude he would mention during his fight in the Genocide run: that he would force himself to befriend the ‘Anomaly’ in order to get on its good side. This would have been sad, but almost… expected, coming from him.

But now… Just then, with this one sentence, she finally realized that it wasn’t even about that anymore. She had seemed to regain his trust as soon as he had been proved that she had been honest all along; and from that moment onwards, he had opened up so easily to her…

Maybe he just genuinely needed someone he could have a nice chat with? He wasn’t answering all the questions she had, but he didn’t seem to mind her being in what was supposed to be the most secret place he owned; and if it truly contained the machine he used to save his memory, this was also the place that made him the most vulnerable.

This really had to mean that he trusted her; and he did so to an extent she would have never thought possible of him.

Maybe he was just so tired… he didn’t even care about secrets anymore. He was thinking that this was going to be the end. Just by looking at him, and knowing that he could remember the Resets— he had definitely seen the Surface at some point. He had explicitly stated that this was his ultimate goal. Reach the Surface, settle a new life, and finally move on along with everyone. So… Maybe he just wanted to get most of his burdens over with before leaving.

He would have enough physical weight to move to the Surface anyway; the psychological ones that weren’t needed were better left behind in the Underground.

She had stayed by his side for the first few minutes, but soon enough, watching him in silence started to get boring, especially since she could hardly understand what he was writing down. Part of her was surprised when she realized that she couldn’t see any trace of Wingdings anywhere and that his handwriting didn’t look like Comic Sans at all, but then again, his blueprints and scribbles didn’t need to be written in an illegible font to be nearly indecipherable.

… Also, after bending like this for too long, her neck might eventually get a crick.

So she silently left him at his work, contemplating the rest of the room for a bit. Before she knew it, she was just a few feet away from the purplish curtain that was supposed to cover what was implied by the game to be an old busted machine of some kind. So, this was the infamous machine he had mentioned earlier? And his plan involved fixing it…

She still wanted to avoid getting too close to it. Despite what Sans had said, she deeply felt like she was intruding; and she was certain that this machine in particular…

She was certain he wouldn’t have actually wanted her anywhere near it, under more normal circumstances — if he didn’t think that she knew about his secrets already.

The game’s canon and the theories she had read implied that this machine held some deep connection with him; maybe it had some sentimental value, or it represented something potentially depressing in his past…

Maybe it was completely irrelevant. Or maybe it had to do with the elusive Dr. W. D. Gaster and his tragic demise.

She was in the most perfect place if she wanted answers to her questions, and the best part of it was that Sans seemed to be willing to answer practically all of them, as long as she bothered to openly ask them.

But… It wasn’t fair. As much as curiosity ate her from the inside, she just couldn’t bring herself to ask too much.

Maybe the reason he was answering her questions had nothing to do with him actually wanting to talk about it: the real reason could be anything. Maybe her being human and the newest Anomaly made him wary or intimidated by her and he thought that satisfying her curiosity was the best way to stay on her good side and keep her from potentially abusing her time-related powers for whatever reasons. Maybe he had become so nihilistic, he thought that it was pointless to try to keep anything from her since she already knew way more than she should and could just as well piece everything together if she became nosy, so maybe answering everything right off the bat would prevent her from being nosy and potentially start messing with his things… She did not bother trying to find other reasons he could have thought about, and there was a very simple reason for this:

These were all terrible reasons to have him talk about his problems.

“you can remove the blanket if you want, you know. i think it just might make it easier to look at it.”

She shrieked in surprise, jumping about three feet to her side. Somehow, Sans had appeared right next to her without warning, literally coming out of nowhere, and he had taken that opportunity to give her a giant grin and did he just meme her?

As soon as he saw her terrified expression and heard her scream though, his grin literally melted away. As much as his permanent grin could fade, at least; it was a very subtle shift, just noticeable enough to show that he had actually stopped smiling.

Dawn mimed some coughing before apologizing for overreacting, muttering she just wasn’t used to people teleporting around her, but it had sounded like she was dismissing the actual reason behind her fright, somehow. He sent her a confused look, but soon his pupils flashed with a wave of understanding, and… actual guilt? They darted in the opposite direction, running away from her.

“… did i really spook you that badly?”

He had sounded so… small. The sheepish and strained smile on his face, and the way he had shifted his skull away from her, made her realize that he was actually blaming himself for her reaction. Did he think that he had gone too far? But this was just a prank! And it was her fault for being so easily startled by such obvious and cheap tricks.

She didn’t remember him pulling that specific one in the game, but given all the other jokes he did, everyone could, and had imagined him doing it at some point.

The fanon had definitely made a lot of comics or jokes where he would appear out of nowhere in order to scare people and make it sound like he had been watching them all along. She thought most of the situations where that joke would happen were cases where someone had wronged Papyrus in some hilarious and stupid way, like accidentally swearing in his presence or telling him the truth about his spaghetti. This was never a prank meant to be taken seriously, and this was certainly not a prank he was supposed to feel bad for.

“O-oh, uh,” She was stuttering. She hated when she couldn’t stop her stuttering. “I just t-tend to be affected even b-by the cheapest jump-scares… Even when they’re obvious, they always get me, and everyone else laughs ‘cause it makes me look stupid…”

“i, uh… i meant earlier.”

What do you mean earli— oh.

Right… That moment when gravity had gave in and she had been given the front row seats to a wonderful prelude of Sans’s infamous bad time, had he been actually serious with his threats. Okay, maybe she still had trouble erasing these horrifying images from her memory even though they had both agreed not to talk about that event ever again and to deny it had ever occurred.

“you… really seemed to take it a lot harder than i thought you would.” he eventually muttered. “guess it took you off guard ‘cause you really had no idea what i was doin that for, but even then…”

… Of course he had noticed. Even before she had realized herself, at that.

His pupils slightly flashed to a cyan color for a split second as he stared at her chest. The small glowing orbs hadn’t changed in form or size and the effect only lasted for a second before they returned to their usual white and he turned his skull away from her, but a shiver had still crawled its way up her spine against her volition.

“I… W-well okay it’s not j-just that. But it’s n-not your fault. I’ve just always… had t-trouble with things related to…” She gulped. She really didn’t want to have that discussion right now. “It’s… L-look it’s pretty embarrassing and it’s r-really not important.”

“aw, c’mon.” he retorted jokingly. “t’s not like i could tell anyone you know ‘bout it.” He winked and nudged her jokingly, but she stiffened slightly and unconsciously when his elbow invaded her personal space. His smile dropped as soon as he noticed and he swiftly retracted his arm in response.

“Let’s… j-just say there’s a reason why I really can’t watch horror movies.” She was desperately trying to avoid his look but somehow her eyes couldn’t help but go back to staring at him every time she managed to pull them away from him, as if she were anxiously dreading his reaction.

Her answer hadn’t seemed to give him as many clues as she had imagined. He pondered her sentence for a bit, but then he appeared to reach a conclusion, whether correct or erroneous. And then he just had to ask that question.

“you mean it has to do with ‘evil scary monsters’ or some stuff like that?” Funnily, he didn’t seem offended by the idea. Almost amused, actually. Or just confused. It was hard to read his expression. “i uh, don’t actually know what humans put in their horror shows. ‘specially ones from another world where magic doesn’t exist. are ‘evil monsters’ stories a thing?”

“Uh, I-I guess so, but… I mean…” Okay that was becoming way too embarrassing and she felt like she really would not find any way to change the topic by now. Just peachy. She was starting to feel her entire face redden and get warmer by the second and she really just wanted to wrap this up by now.

“i wonder what stupid stuff you could’ve thought about.” he stated out loud. And he was grinning. Okay now he was just doing this to mess with her, she knew it, and dang it this was making her look ridiculous and he loved it. “if magic doesn’t exist, then what sort of stuff could give you ideas for horror stories? unless you don’t need magic to still think about the possibility? guess that’d explain how you still get what’s going on around here even if you don’t know much about the concepts from this reality.”

“No, look, you just don’t…”

She was face-palming with both hands as an attempt to hide her face in shame, now almost as red as her flannel shirt. He nudged her again, this time more gently than the time before, once more encouraging her to tell him, because if he had been sharing some of his secrets with her it was only right for her to return the favor and God damn it what a troll.

Oh for Pete’s sake what the hell she’d just say it and get it over with already.

“I can’t stand stuff related to DEATH.” Her arms flung around in exasperation. “Okay? Corpses, blood, that stuff, it’s always creeped me out and I even started to see a therapist three years ago in order to try and tone it down because that’s a completely stupid thing to be scared of. Happy now?”

He just… blinked. The revelation appeared to take a few seconds before it sank in… Ooh, right. Now that he was thinking back of his time on the Surface, that sort of behavior did ring a bell.

“i… already was a skeleton even back when you were watchin the game, right? i mean ok you didn’t play it, but you still knew a lot of stuff so you must’ve—”

“Yes-I-know-and-I’m-sorry-to-tell-you-that-but-you-just really don’t look like the game sprite or the fanarts and OH MY GOD I’m sorry that’s REALLY NOT how I wanted to put it.”

Sans watched the human scowl in embarrassment and bury her head in her arms while spinning away from him overdramatically, and at first he couldn’t help but laugh at her childish demeanor. But then, as he managed to regain control over his breathing, he started to realize.

Maybe she just… wasn’t actually done with the existential crisis problem, now that he was taking a moment to think about it. Hadn’t she mentioned that she was still “trying her best not to freak out”, just a few minutes earlier? Yeah, that was what she had said…

“Look.” She buried her head back in her hands and sighed. “I… I’m sure I’m just a bit on edge because of everything that happened, and now I’m overreacting and you must be thinking I’m acting stupid or— i-is specism a thing? I-I’m n-not… but… Ugh. You don’t… I-it’s really not so bad. You looked a lot scarier in the dark is all. A-and I’m sure the ‘blue-light-from-under-your-face’ trick didn’t help when I was in the air and…” Her eye twitched awkwardly. “But. That was earlier. Just– g-gimme some time. It’ll get better. So… C-can we just drop that conversation now? Please?”

He tilted his skull towards her, studying her in silence. She pursed her lips and felt her face blush once more, so she forcedly looked away and tried to take deep breaths. That made him chuckle bluntly once more, she gave him an embarrassed yet betrayed look, and he apologized, now laughing twice as hard as he shook his skull.

“heh… ok, if you insist. but… joke aside? you really don’t need to beat yourself over it that much. i’ve been on the surface before, so i’ve seen how humans react to us in general. and these humans were already used to magic. to some extent.” She sent him a shy look. His smile grew a bit, as he shrugged jokingly. “before we met… i can’t exactly say i hadn’t seen it coming. even if you knew me already, i guess some things just can’t be helped.”

She sighed guiltily. “I guess humankind isn’t exactly known for its tolerance, huh? Not that I’m putting any good example right now…” she muttered in shame.

“naaaaaah. honestly, you’re not doing too bad. ‘specially if it’s some phobia material you were talkin’ about. hard to believe you have one at all.”

“Well I did get over my fear of Halloween decorations two years ago.” she smirked. Then when she saw his confused expression she realized that he probably didn’t know what ‘Halloween’ was. “Uuh… I just meant to say, i-it’s obvious that you’re alive and all, and that’s what counts. As long as I don’t see anything die or already dead, things should be fine.”

This time, his chuckling had sounded a lot darker and forced. Her smile dropped.

… She suddenly remembered what she had previously theorized regarding the outcome of the timeline they were currently in. Then again, she had reached that conclusion through assuming that Sans could not remember the Resets, so maybe…

“good thing you’re late to the show, then.”

There was a long and tense pause.

“What… happened exactly?” She gulped in anticipation. “Which timeline is this? A-am I saying it right…?”

“i killed Frisk.” His pupils darkened and darted away, his skull tilting down in shame. His expression seemed to be composed of sadness, concern, relief…? She was not really sure how she should interpret it. “… t’was around a month ago.”

There was only one way it could have been possible for him to do that. A strong silence filled the room. Her stomach sank and she bit her bottom lip, but she didn’t give him any noticeable reaction to his speech. A few seconds later though, her head tilted in sudden realization:

“But… wait. I-if Frisk died, then what happened to their soul? I m-mean, that makes your remaining seventh human soul, right…? And, you killed them before they killed Asgore, so… Did he break the Barrier or something?”

“no. the kid’s soul disintegrated a few seconds after their death, as usual.”

She gave him a blank look, but then remembered the way ‘Game overs’ worked and how the little red heart would indeed shatter each time the player’s HP reached zero. That was… strange, and sad for them, but… She wasn’t sure what to think of such situation, she realized.

Was Frisk actually ‘alive’ the same way Sans and the others were? They never were in control of anything during the game, not even of their own body as it seemed, so it was hard to tell. In fact, seeing how they were the one being permanently controlled either by the player or by Chara, she hoped that they didn’t have that sort of sentience the other monsters did.

Even if they appeared to live in a virtual world and as such could only be ‘artificial intelligences’ of some kind, Sans had proven to her that their emotions and feelings were very real. Being forced to be sentient yet not having any possibility to do anything at all… Well, she had read a few fanfics about this kind of situation already, and no matter the quality of these fanfics, the tragedy they described could easily be empathized and lamented about.        . When she thought over the situation under a purely logical perspective, however, she rationalized that this situation, while not impossible, would feel unnecessary.

Although she was not herself a specialist when it came to programming and data manipulation, one thing she was certain about was that if something was unnecessary in a program, that feature was either dummied out, or entirely removed. If Frisk were always meant to be the player’s avatar, she thought it to be unlikely for Toby Fox to specifically think of a personality and personal life for them, even if it was to be dummied out afterwards.

So… Part of her felt reassured when she managed to convince herself that, unlike the monsters, it was very likely that Frisk was an actual robot, or some kind of empty shell ready to be taken over by the players. This also would mean that whenever the monsters were killing them… Well, unlike when the players would kill monsters, it meant that they truly weren’t actually hurting anyone, even if they weren’t aware of it.

Then again, if she tried to refine this perspective by turning the situation the other way around… If Frisk always was just a decoy created by the video game as some sort of MacGuffin, it would also explain why their soul could never be taken by anyone. Chances were, this little red heart wasn’t even a real SOUL to begin with.

“well… i guess it’s for the best anyway. if we could get to the surface right now, it’d be to wage war against humans. and i think we both know how that would’ve ended.”

She bit her lip, looked away and nodded tensely. He sighed again. As much as she could easily convince herself that Frisk’s SOUL probably meant nothing… It didn’t change the impact their arrival in this world had on the real people that already lived inside. How many monsters were there? The game only showed a few dozens of them at best, but a few more were mentioned, and who knows? Maybe there were more, even if the game never gave the players the opportunity to meet them. And they were all…

They were all suffering the same way Sans had.

They couldn’t remember the Resets, but still, the fact of thinking of Papyrus, Undyne, Alphys, Toriel, Asgore, Mettaton… And there were so many others her mind hardly dared mention by name, as she felt that her eyes had started to sting.

They all suffered so much from the actions of the game; the realization that thinking about the fate of the ‘main characters’ was just the tip of the iceberg and that now, every single inhabitant of the Underground was actually a single individual with independent memories and feelings of their own…

She felt like gulping, or saying something, anything; but her throat was completely dry.

“in any case… i actually had a question for you.” She tilted her head in surprise; he was avoiding her look at first, but after he took a short breath, his two shining pupils dashed in her direction. “it’s just… from the point when the game took over, we hardly had any break at all. time’d usually jump back within the next few minutes if frisk died, or within the next twenty-four hours if they reach the barrier, or… well, sometimes if they get killed repeatedly, they also take longer to come back.”

“_{Might be when the player rage-quits…}” she promptly muttered under her breath; seeing her low tone and absorbed look, Sans realized that she probably had not meant to actually say it out loud.

“… yeah. maybe. anyway…” He sighed, enlarging the pause to better gain her full attention: “this is literally the first time there hasn’t been a time jump in over a month. i was just curious about it, y’know. so… by any chance, would you know about something that could explain it? did anything happen with that game during the past month?”

The human lowered her look and squinted her eyes, taking a few seconds to think back as seriously and thoroughly as she could. After a few seconds, her mouth opened again:

“Hm… I think I could think of something, actually…” He widened his eye-sockets immediately, silently yet eagerly urging her to continue: “I mean, it didn’t happen exactly one month ago, but… Sometime around the beginning of March, there was an update on the game. Version one-point-zero-zero-whatever.”

“an ‘update’?” he repeated incredulously, then asked hurriedly: “what kind of update?”

“S-sorry, I really don’t know that much about it… But now that you mention it, I remember that some of the dataminers were disappointed because they hadn’t noticed anything different. At least, well, nothing ‘interesting.’ The other times we had some new lines of dialogue or new plot features, but… Not this time.”

But then again… What if there had been something different during that update…? It just had to be something that none of them had noticed before. If a change had been introduced, but that this change involved something that they didn’t even know existed in the first place… There was no questioning why nobody would notice it.

“You think it could’ve done something to stop the game from acting here already? Do you think that they found out about you being real and already found a way to solve the problem?” Suddenly, she was beaming and hopeful.

… Hmm. That’s an… interesting coincidence.

Sans seemed unsure. “i… wouldn’t bet on that. but if that’s the case… t’was about time they did. how long’s been the game out, anyway?”

“Well… I heard there was a free demo available all the way back in 2013, but it was far from being a finished game, so, that one probably doesn’t count.”

She suddenly froze in place, as she started contemplating that option. The only area that could be explored in the demo was that of the Ruins, but then again… As far as she knew, the demo’s plot, dialogue options and looks, were practically identical to the final product, when it came to the part that was effectively available. So if the game’s world was somehow real from the start…

“Wait, no… What if it was already taking effect even back then, too?” Suddenly addressing him, she stared at him with curious yet determined eyes. “Would you remember making a speech with Papyrus where you’d be in a dark place and lying on a deckchair while drinking soda?”

Sans gave her a weird look, surprised she would ever ask such random question, and all the more dumbfounded that she would ask it with a straight face, no less.

Just as quickly, her eyes lost that spark of certainty and she looked down in confusion.

“… Oh wait, never mind, I think that one came from the Kickstarter instead. So… Y-yeah, let’s just ignore the demo stuff.” She gave her a sheepish grin, but it quickly faded. “The finished game came out on September 2015. Which means that by now, it’s been…” She quickly stared at the ceiling as she made the math. “… a bit more than eight months, I guess.”

“eight months…”

He repeated those two words in a heavy tone, pondering about their meaning and their deepest implications. When she realized that he was counting it as the amount of time he had been actually stuck in the time loops, her face dropped and she felt as if something new within her chest had just missed a heartbeat. Except that it didn’t quite feel like her biological heart.

In the end, he just sighed again, running a bony hand on his forehead and taking deep breaths.

“well… thanks for tellin me, anyway. i don’t exactly know what to do with that info, but… i suppose that’s all we’re gonna get, huh.”

Dawn thought back of the implications of the hypothesis she had made. What if the update truly had this purpose? This would mean that someone in Toby Fox’s team, whether Toby Fox himself or someone else, had eventually found out that the world they had created was somehow alive, and…

Well, the good news was, chances were that they did manage to make it so that even if people from her world kept playing Undertale, these players’ games would stop messing with this world. But she also realized that if the game couldn’t Reset anymore… Then, without Sans’s machine or anyone else able to use that power; it meant that everyone was now completely stuck in one of the worst timelines of all, forever. Did Toby Fox know which timeline he had trapped everyone in, or…?

She realized that when she had brought up this possibility, Sans had felt very uneasy about considering this option. Because if this truly was what had happened, then it could only mean one thing: there was no more purpose for a ‘shield’ against the Resets anymore. But although thinking about this possibility made her feel a little sad for him… She still felt differently about the situation as a whole.

There was a chance that bringing her here was completely pointless when it came to her alleged ability to stop the Resets… But it did not mean that she could not help with literally anything else.

Whether the game still had an effect on this world or not, a Reset still had to be made at some point in order to save everyone, and that very specific Reset would only be done through one specific way. She had the power to make that very special Reset; but this wasn’t what Sans was looking for, and she respected that decision.

So instead, she would help him through any other option she had; she assumed that this would take them a while… But she didn’t mind so much. As long as they were doing this for a purpose, this was what mattered.

“anyway.” Sans sighed again after some more silence. “guess that means i should go back to work, now.” He unexpectedly bent his spine backwards and proceeded to pop every single vertebra in his body one after the others while exaggeratedly grunting like an old guy. The human couldn’t help but stare wide-eyed at how was that even possible. He looked at her expression, rolled his eyes overdramatically, and snorted. “fine, you got me, i was messin’ with ya on purpose this time.” That troll.

She tried to give him an annoyed glare, but quickly found herself incapable of actually doing it, as she had started giggling uncontrollably at his nonsensical shenanigans.

Before she knew it, her burning forehead was buried within her hands as she couldn’t stop her exhausted and idiotic laughter. She was just… done. She was done.

Well, this wasn’t too bad a situation. But that was just too much all at once and now she needed one hell of a break.

The skeleton observed her for a few seconds, calmly joining her laugh at first, but soon he just shook his head lightly with a goofy smile.

When the human finally managed to take a deep breath and stop her hilarity, he was already back to sitting on his desk, but he still gave her a patient look as soon as he heard her silence. Of course he knew what was going on.

“that being said… in the meantime, well, you can stay here, but i’d understand if you need some time to, uh. let everything sink in or whatever.” She made a nervous smile and her eyes darted away. He chuckled and pointed his skull towards the other end of the room: “door’s unlocked, by the way.”

Dawn hesitated a bit, but she soon came back to look at him in the eye and send him a genuine smile. “I… Thanks. I think I’ll take a little stroll, actually. I think… I need some fresh air after all this.”

As fresh as the air could get in the Underground, that was… Then again, they were in Snowdin, so maybe the cold could help her keep a cool head. She walked towards the end of the room and only stopped when her hand went to rest on the knob. Just before leaving, she added:

“I won’t be too far, don’t worry.”

The monster didn’t really seem to care about that last part, as he was already too deep into his thoughts and merely sent her an absent-minded wave before he muttered something that sounded like “yeah whatev, t’s not like y’could go anywhere.”, probably without he realized it.

… Right. That too. It was very likely that his house was the only place where she would be welcomed at all, here.

She had expected to directly meet up with freezing air, snow and pine trees as soon as she would open the door upstairs, but surprisingly, after climbing the stairs and opening a second one, she instead ended up indoors.

To be more specific, after a few more steps forward, she realized that she was now standing in the middle of the living room of Sans’s and Papyrus’s house. Huh.

Under other circumstances, she would have paused to question why there was such an obvious inconsistency with the game… But instead of this, as soon as she devoted more attention to her new surroundings… Once more, something foreign yet familiar in her chest sank.

The couch was missing obviously, since Sans had put it in the basement for some reason; but even if she overlooked this element… She actually had a hard time recognizing the place. It looked so different than the one from the game; not because any notable detail would truly be out of place; but the atmosphere of the ensemble was enough to give her a rush of sadness and guilt.

Was this… what the house looked like when there was nobody to take care of it anymore…?

Sans had said that the Genocide had occurred about a month earlier. This house… Papyrus had been gone for an entire month. As had everyone else.

Sans had definitely not spared any time for maintaining the life and warmth in this place; not only because of his alleged laziness, but most probably, as she theorized, because he had been way too busy with his work related to otherworldly shenanigans to focus on something as trivial as housework.

Without Papyrus… This house truly had lost its life, as well.

This… was just too much to watch. She gulped, then rushed towards the front door and ran outside, the snow cracking under her footsteps. She stopped only a few feet away from the house, standing in place and gawking around her.

The town. Snowdin Town. This town was real.

The Underground was real. And it was empty.

If she had been keeping any doubts over whether this entire situation was real or not, this was what would have made them vanish for good. On her left side stretched an unending snowed path filled with fog and pine trees, and on her right laid an oh-so-familiar town.

Or at least, the empty and dark buildings of a town.

Was the Underground always supposed to be so dark? If they had been on the surface, she would have believed that the sun had set hours earlier and that no stars were visible due to unfavorable weather conditions; but when she looked at what was supposed to be the sky, she only saw pure blackness. Her eyes weren’t nearly sensitive enough to distinguish whether there was anything special on the ceiling or if it was merely composed of stone, but seeing how dark the surroundings were… She really hoped that the monsters didn’t have to deal with this darkness constantly: the only visible light around was coming from the house right behind her. As for the rest… Everything else was dead. This really had become a ghost town.

After some time, surprisingly, this view stopped affecting her so deeply. At first, she feared that she was distancing herself from this cruel reality, that maybe as some sort of coping mechanism she had tried to protect herself by not caring about the horrors of this world anymore, and that she was starting to respond to this situation in a fully apathetic manner; but soon, she understood what this rising feeling was.

It was probably born out of some frustration or anger in response to the unfairness of this situation, but when the features on her face hardened, only the sudden realization almost managed to break this expression, when the thought made her crack a small and sad ironic smile.

She was filled with determination.

She stopped caring about this horrendous situation, because deep inside this familiar yet strange something in her chest, she knew. She knew this wasn’t the end.

She believed in Sans’s plan. She would help him all the way. She knew they would succeed.

They would do it, together. They would save everyone.

Now that she had been reminded of it… She felt some small guilty curiosity. Well, she wasn’t sure why this curiosity made her feel guilty, because as long as she wouldn’t use it as an excuse to make selfish and dangerous decisions, it was fine; but… She was inside the game, and she was supposed to be the one in charge, right?

She really wanted to know what the consequences to this fact were. What were her SOUL’s stats? Would she find some SAVE Points around the Underground? How would ‘SAVING’ work? She had made a point ahead of time that even if given the opportunity to do so, she obviously wouldn’t try to figure out how ‘Resetting’ worked; but ‘SAVING’ wouldn’t hurt anybody, right? If anything, it only ensured that their progress would be, well, ‘Saved’; this was a good thing!

She quickly squinted her eyes as she tried to look in the distance towards the other end of the town; there was supposed to be a SAVE Point over there in the game, right between the Snowed Inn and the Shop… but sadly, she couldn’t find anything.

The air really was cold; she could see her own breath, and even though this wouldn’t normally deter her since she was used to seeing this in her home town every year during the winter season, this time was different. It was supposed to be the beginning of May in her own world: her current outfit was definitely not fit for an expedition in the coldest area of the Underground, that was for sure.

She would have thought of taking the ‘Undersnow Tunnels’ and exploring more thoroughly the other side of the town in order to check whether the SAVE Point was there or not, but the cold was already starting to get to her, and given how dark the place seemed to be…                                    . She certainly did not want to find herself alone in a ghost town at the darkest hour of the day. Even if the SAVE Points looked like small stars in the game, chances were, they weren’t truly shining any true light, so she wouldn’t be able to see them in such darkness anyway.

And again… what need would they have for a SAVE File, in the end? It wasn’t like they would go back to anything, and if Sans was right about his plan, soon, nobody else would ever be able to.

She heard some distant footsteps in her back. They came from inside the house, as she had stupidly left the door open. She turned towards Sans and sent him a shy smile.

“hey, uh… ‘dawn’, right?” He stopped patiently right at the entrance of his house, his shadow spreading over the snow below their feet. “just wanted to say, it’s almost time for dinner. you hungry?”

Dinner already, huh…? Somehow, it felt like her biological clock claimed that it was too early for that. So she shrugged, then shook her head while pursing her lips in a dorky pout.

“… Not really. How about you?”

“just a bit.” He shrugged too. Then his eyes darted to the side, reluctantly. “… still have to go, though.”

“Where are you going?” she asked immediately, her eyes reflecting some curiosity among her confusion.

“hotland. since, uh, y’know, the survivors sheltered in the lab and stuff.” His left hand got out of his hoodie’s pocket and went to scratch the back of his skull awkwardly. “sorry i’m not offering you to come along, but… i guess you understand why i can’t really bring you around.”

… Right. Near-Genocide ending.

Her brain quickly formed a mental image of how everyone in the True Laboratory would freak out after Sans would have brought a human through a shortcut only a month after an even younger human had been responsible for killing everyone they knew… Yeah. Bad idea.

“i’ll try to be quick, but just in case something happens… worst case scenario, i should be back in an hour and a half. can you wait till then?” She nodded confidently, and his smile seemed to become a little more genuine as his look somewhat softened. “okay then. see ya. in the meantime just, i dunno, do whatever you want.”

“Yeah… To be honest? I thought of something.”

Sans raised a nonexistent eyebrow in surprise, silently inciting her to explain:

“I know that everything here’s going to be Reset once we’re done fixing your machine and all, so it won’t matter in the end and everything, but…” She took a deep breath. “We’re still going to be stuck here for a while, before you launch the Reset. Right?”

“uh…” He turned his skull away, deep in thought yet also a bit embarrassed. “i guess so…? it’ll probably take a few weeks at best, true…”

“Right. So… I just thought. We’re going to be living here for a while. And since I’m going to stay here, I’d like to be useful. So, I don’t know if you’ll let me help you fix the machine, but in the meantime…? There’s something else in this house that needs some fixing, too. Or some cleaning or whatever.” She sent him an unsure look. This still wasn’t technically her house, so if only for courtesy, she still had to ask for his approval first: “You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

He seemed to give so little care to the matter, the fact that she asked him that question actually surprised him deeply.

“well… sure? knock yourself out?” He scratched his skull again, completely confused. “just, uh. please leave the basement out of this.”

“Of course. Then again,” she jokingly raised her eyes slyly and theatrically rubbed her chin with a pseudo-pensive look and a smug grin, “I could always try to rearrange your papers in alphabetical order.”

Sans’s expression was now only that of two wide empty eye-holes and a strained horrified smirk. “PLEASE DON’T.”

His face was genuinely horrifying, but she could see that it was a threatened expression instead of a threatening one; thus, although she had instinctively looked away, she had immediately burst in loud laughs. “Oh, come on! Anyone could’ve seen from a mile away that I was kidding.”

“i know. but even thinking about something so sadistic. this is evil. only an evil mastermind could do something so twisted.”

“Yes.” She attempted her best impression of a villainous smirk. “I’m the evilest human you’ll ever see. Your basement will be so perfectly clean and polished, your feeble eyes won’t even be able to look at it. You’ll never be able to approach your machine because its reflection will be so bright, it’ll blind you with its cleanness.”

“well, i knew it. no soap, evil human. if you keep going down this dirty path, i’m afraid i’ll have to polish you too.” And there they were, laughing like idiots and taking over the conversation where the other had left it off, only to make it even more nonsensical. When Sans managed to regain control over his hilarity, he perked a quick glance at the watch on his left wrist: “… heh… welp. guess i really should go, or they’re gonna start to worry.”

Dawn nodded encouragingly. He sent her a friendly wave in return, to which she responded with a thumbs up.

And then he disappeared. She hadn’t seen him moving or anything (no, not even a snap of fingers), but he had merely vanished in an instant, just like that.

… Welp. Here was a shortcut, then.

Anyway. She had about an hour and a half before dinner, right? She might as well get started.

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Sans’s shortcut to the Hotland lab facilities was, as usual, executed without a hitch. He perked a few wary glances left and right out of habit before getting out of the shadows, then casually made his way to the front door and inside the main building. A button was pressed, and he patiently waited for the elevator down to the basement.

Until the main door opened again and someone leisurely walked in his direction.

“Oh. Howdy, Sans! Long time no see.”

He froze in place, mentally cursing his luck. This voice…

When he had told the human that she would have to wait for an hour and a half at most, it was definitely not because he had actually meant to stay for that long. He had just preferred telling her that she would have to wait rather than having her worry or expect him to come back too soon; nothing more.

He had planned to just get in, grab the grub, and then get out before anyone truly had the time to notice he had ever been there. Or, well, he wanted to get to be seen by just enough monsters to let them notice his presence, but not enough to meet someone he actually knew and get stuck in an awkward conversation for who knew how long.

So, of course, of all the monsters he could have been greeted with, it just had to be him.

Sans inhaled swiftly and nervously, then turned around and raised his skull as far up as his spine could allow him. Here stood Asgore.

“oh, uh… h-heya. y-your majesty?” He started giving a small wave. Then he stared at his hand, wondering if that was respectful enough or if he was supposed to follow some sort of protocol that he did not know about. “i just, uh… went for the gru… i mean dinner, y’know. heh eh.”

The Boss Monster gave a deep, but genuine laugh upon seeing the skeleton’s nervousness.

“Of course you did.” he muttered jokingly, bending forward slightly and letting an amused yet desperately morose spark glimmer in his eyes. “You of all monsters deserve a break every now and then.”

“heh, yeah, i do kinda enjoy taking it easy and all that, from time to time…” Someone just get him out of this. Please.

Sweet mercy, the elevator behind him rang and opened its mechanical doors, distracting the taller monster from him, if only for an instant. Asgore was not the kind of person to be bothered by these slip-ups and occasional misbehaviors, but if only because he was a member of the royalty, it was just hard to know how to properly speak to him; especially in the timeline they were currently in.

Asgore gently gestured him to enter first, so he did, and he was followed silently. Sans pressed the button to lead them in the basement, then buried his hands in his pockets.

This… was fine.

He was just stuck in a small elevator making some small talk with the king of the Underground and all the monsters who survived after the murderous rampage of what had appeared to be a human terrorizing an entire race, also known as the king who still had six human souls at his disposal, who had sworn to protect all his remaining subjects and was now fully resolved to absorb said six souls if any true danger were to come again, for example, a ninth human who would just happen to somehow magically appear out of nowhere and be in hiding in his house all the way back in Snowdin Town.

No big deal.

“What were you doing outside of the shelter?” Sans stiffened with just enough discretion so as to not let the other monster notice. There had been no suspicion in his voice; rather, just a hint of concern, and maybe of confusion. But still, he just couldn’t help but feel on edge. “I still wonder why you preferred staying isolated like this while working on your project. It would have been safer for you to stay in the laboratory. Besides, you would have had access to all the materials and resources the other scientists have at their disposal...”

Even though Sans knew a little bit more about Asgore’s personal life than he should thanks to his adventures throughout time and memories of past alternate events, they had never been particularly close — especially since, well, it was hard to get close to a member of the royalty during his reign, even if this particular member was known for doing his best to stay as close as possible to his subjects.

Still. This Asgore… This was a version he had never truly been given the chance of getting to know at any other point during the past timelines, and this was a version he… really would have preferred not getting to know at all.

“well, y-yeah, but… the machine’s been standing all the way back there for ages, so i just didn’t really feel like movin’ it around… you could say it’s kinda a… family heirloom. y’know. has some sentimental value an’ all that.”

This was an Asgore who loved his subjects more than anything else in the entire world, because they were literally the only thing left that he cared about. And after he felt like he had already failed them when Alphys had been unable to contact him in time about the “murderous human child” issue… This was an Asgore who had put his grief past him for real.

This was an Asgore who, after witnessing so much pain and horror coming from one single human child, had ultimately lost all lingering faith he had in humanity. If a child could be such a demon, what could the adults possibly be like?

“I... see. Yes. Of course it would.” Asgore glanced to the side, an obvious flow of melancholy and nostalgia stirring within. “Why did the humans that came down here always have to take so much from all of us...? I simply cannot understand.”

This was an Asgore who had lost hope, but who had gained the will to… get revenge, maybe? Not even that was certain. The plan was basically the same as before; except that contrary to the previous times when he had to deal with Frisk, this specific time, he really was willing to go through with it. Because if he didn’t, he would go through the risk of losing all he had left.

“oh, humans had nothing to do with his… uh, i mean, i-it’s got nothin’ to do with all that. it’s just that it’s, well, was, his greatest invention and all, so…”

He laughed nervously for a bit. Then he stopped.

Better to change the subject.

“what about you? you were…”

He had lost everything for the third time in his life. Each of the previous occurrences had left their own aching mark; but this last one… It had not even been done by an actual human at this point, technically speaking; but only Sans truly knew better. The others didn’t know that.

“I was looking after the souls, yes.” the King nodded slowly, yet sternly. “We cannot afford to leave them without supervision for too long. And even though we do have some volunteers to look after them at all times, I simply could not help but verify myself, after the blackout occurred.”

The elevator stopped. There was a ding. The doors opened.

Asgore exited first. Sans released a small sigh when he thought the other monster could not hear him, then he followed.

Had he been given even the illusion of a choice, he would have obviously chosen a more welcoming timeline before inviting his special guest around. But sadly, he was not exactly ready to pass up the opportunity he had been given, knowing full well how unlikely it would have been for him to be given a second chance. If he had been brought back to this point in time when he had first discovered everything, he knew he would have done it again.

Then again, now that he thought about it, maybe he should have warned the human about the real danger of her exposure and made sure she would stay put.

His entire body was stilled as he stared in the distance, pondering his options for the duration of exactly two seconds and a half. Then he shrugged. Internally.

… meh. she’ll be fine.

He’d probably just forget when he got back home, anyway. Or be too lazy to think about it. But that wouldn’t be a problem. She already knew the context and she knew so much already about pretty much everything there was to know in the first place: she should be clever enough to figure it out on her own and avoid getting herself in trouble.

As long as they were the only ones ever wandering around Snowdin or outside the laboratory, it would be unlikely for her to be discovered by someone else. They just needed to avoid the cameras, but then again, what use would they have for going so far into the wilderness?

“Oh, right! I almost forgot.” Asgore’s giant head tilted upwards in sudden realization, and the sound of his exclamation vigorously pulled the skeleton away from his thoughts. “You came just in time, actually. I was told that Alphys wanted to see you.”

Sans blinked in confusion. “did she, now…?”

“She did. Actually, I believe it was related to the power outage from earlier.” A gleam of genuine and somewhat childish joy sparked in the taller monster’s eyes before he continued, as if he had just made a hopeful deduction: “Does it mean that your project has advanced enough so you could start a few tests of some sort?”

Ugh. Touché. Not exactly what he had in mind, but… This hit way too close to the truth for his liking. And now he had better finish his time machine as fast as possible because if he took too long, the King of the Underground of all people could start to become suspicious. Just great.

“well i’m not done yet, but… you could say that the first half of what had to be done, is done. and…”

The skeleton paused, seemingly considering whether what he had in mind really was worth saying… But after thinking a little more about it, he decided that he could give himself that little bit of credit. He did just manage to make interdimensional travel real. That did probably deserve at least a little bit of praise.

Slightly despite him, but also because he gladly allowed it, his skull ended up smiling with a slight yet almost smug spark of pride.

“… well, yeah. guess i did make some real progress. for science.”

“I am very glad to hear this.” Asgore answered, a satisfied and happy smile spreading on his face. “Well… I will not keep you busy for any longer. I am certain that Alphys is looking for you right now. You should not be making her wait.”

The King promptly left him behind, advancing towards the first door on their left. Sans spent some time to recollect his thoughts and take a deep breath.

So. Alphys wanted to see him, because of the power outage that he had caused during his interdimensional experimental shenanigans. There were so many possible ways it could go. Obviously, he had no idea what she was about to tell him, it wasn’t like he could predict from a mile away how she would react after living through so many outcomes and having known the multiple aspects of her personality for who knew how long.

He rubbed the bridge of his nonexistent nose between two bony fingers, grumbling under his breath in apprehension.

Better to just get this over with. Chances were, if he didn’t come to her, she would find a way to make it to Snowdin all by herself, and if that happened, she would not be happy.

Still. Grub first.

As soon as he opened the door leading to the main lobby, which had been reorganized to serve its new purpose as a dining room and cafeteria of sorts, the noise and large crowd overwhelmed him.

Compared to how many monsters lived in the Underground overall, there were never that many of them left after a run where the kid had been so murderous; but even then, the Hotland Laboratories’ basement was definitely not spacious enough to actually host all of them for so long.

Nonetheless, while the majority of the survivors were gradually relocated in New Home just a few days after the kid was neutralized, they were still always meeting in the Laboratory whenever they needed something. Supplies. Clothes. Food. Announcements from the King.

The laboratory had become the most important hub for pretty much everything. It was the safest place in the whole Underground, the Capitol being a close second thanks to its improved security infrastructures, which had been built in a rush after Frisk’s journey, but were largely strong enough to stand as impressive fortifications for the city. Still, even though they were not technically living there, the laboratory felt safer for a majority of monsters, and since it had turned into the largest public storeroom in the Underground, this was bound to gather the most people given how scared they had been of venturing outside or losing any more than they already had. It took more than two weeks before the first team of the most combat-experienced monsters came out and explored what had become of the Underground, carefully monitored by the security cameras.

Sans quietly joined the line for the food rations, carefully crafting his strategy.

He despised the mere idea of actually going through with what he was about to do, but then again, as long as he didn’t get caught doing it and as long as he had planned to change this timeline for the better anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t really matter.

Besides, it was not like he truly had a choice; even under the most regular circumstances, asking for two rations would have raised quite a handful of eyebrows. The idea of being completely straightforward and casually asking for a second ration because he needed to feed a human in hiding made him laugh internally, but for the sake of the safety of said human and of the entirety of his plan, he just couldn’t be that blunt.

Among the monsters responsible for preparing enough food for everyone, as usual he recognized the bunny shopkeepers from Snowdin Town, that ‘Burgerpants’ guy (he’ll get his real name eventually), and some others he didn’t personally know, but whose faces he had seen a few times before every now and then. He carefully observed the group, the line of the other monsters around him who were, just like him, waiting for their own dinner, and the displays of packed food rations that were stocked all the way in the back of the room, vastly out of reach from everyone in the line and the least supervised of all due to their alleged inaccessibility.

As soon as he saw an open window in time and space where he could exploit a blind spot, he discreetly stretched an arm in what would be commonly considered a vastly unconventional direction, and as swiftly as he could without making any noise, let alone letting anyone suspect that anything was happening, he grabbed a sandwich that was waiting a few dozen feet away from his current position, then retracted his arm the other way through the shortcut and carefully hid his prize in one of his hoodie’s inner pockets. He threw a few worried glances around him out of paranoia, but nobody seemed to have noticed. Good. Now all he had to do was wait for his turn and ask for his own ration, and everything would be fine.

Once finally he was out of the line with one ration in his hand and the other still carefully hidden in his closed jacket, he glanced at his watch and noticed that he had already spent forty whole minutes in that mess. Ugh. Couldn’t he just find a shadowed corner and warp his way back to Snowdin while no one was looking? He’d just pretend he couldn’t find Alphys. He had spent much longer than he had wanted to already, so…

“A-hem.”

Oh God damn it.

Well, at least now he did not need to worry anymore about whether or not he should bother to actually look for the lizard scientist, since she had very obviously found him first. Still, was the entire universe playing a trick on him today? It looked like awfully unlikely coincidences had kept piling up all day long, and that was starting to really rub him the wrong way.

“You weren’t actually going to leave without even saying hi again, especially not after what coincidentally happened to the CORE after it received some unusual energy spike coming from its Snowdin distribution plant, were you?”

… Welp. No more escaping it, now. After conjuring almost all of his remaining energy into stopping himself from face-palming or sighing too loudly due to his weariness and frustration, the skeleton turned around and prepared a casual, yet too little too obviously fake smile.

“… hey, al. how’s it going?”

He knew in all honesty that just pretending that he didn’t know what was wrong and that everything would turn out fine was stupid and counterproductive, but then again, he simply had no idea how else to handle the situation, and he was too exhausted to care. He really just wanted to get this over with and find his way out of here as soon as he could seize his chance.

“I don’t know, Sans.” She rolled her eyes and shrugged in a mixture between amusement and annoyance, as she very obviously mimicked his own teasing attitude. “What do you call a guy who leaves the CORE barely standing after he ran some tests with his creepy quantum physics time-space altering biz, and who doesn’t even show up afterwards to help or apologize, leaving me all alone to fix his mess?”

… Yeeeeeah, she was pissed. Rebooting the entire facility and recalibrating each of its features individually, all of this pretty much all on her own, had to have been a huge pain.

“uh…” Was she expecting him to actually answer, or…? Eventually, he just displayed a guilty apologetic grin and muttered the most obvious answer he could think of: “… a numbskull?”

“A quarky boronic bosonhead who bariumly gives a spin about others’ sulfuring and could’ve at lithium sent me a sine before starting his tests instead of having it all lepton me to fix all he hadron,” she paused just for long enough to breathe, “AND deal with the scared and angry monsters who had no idea what that was all about and never asked for any of this to happen in the first place.”

… Sans was, to put it bluntly, genuinely floored. He might have stared at her with wide eye-sockets for a good dozen seconds of stunned silence. Did he just get owned?

Not waiting for his answer, she gave him a silent sign by pointing the dinner tables all the way back in the main lobby, and he followed without giving it much thought when he realized that he would much rather continue this discussion while sitting. He would have preferred talking in a more private and quiet setting, but apparently he didn’t have a say in that one.

“… ok, wow. good job on that one. it was actually impressive coming from you.” And he completely meant it, at that.

“Thanks! It took me a whole hour to come up with it.”

They reached one of the few free tables and took their seat. She actually looked sincerely grateful for that compliment, which astounded him and left him for a few seconds curious as to whether she wanted to scold him or just joke with him. Almost hopeful, even.

When her sarcastic tone came back though, sadly the former option became the obvious one:

“Then again, you gave me all the time to think on it, when I was stuck in front of the main generator and could do nothing but wait for it to cool down to a level that WOULDN’T risk making the entire Hotlands explode along with it if I gave it even one more task.”

He tried to turn a few sentences in his head in order to find a correct but not-too-obviously standard apology, but he seemed to fail miserably. Then again, maybe he was just too lazy or too tired, and maybe he did not actually care that much about apologizing in the first place.

Well, he had never caused that much damage to the CORE before, had he? This scene was supposed to be entirely new. But then again… Alphys’s scolding tended to always follow the same pattern. Even if she hadn’t even started yet, part of him already knew how it would go if he didn’t do anything to intentionally twist things to force them to follow a different path, and this part of him made him feel… strangely numb.

Sans tried to remember some old memories from the years when they still had some good times together. Since when had she become so predictable and dull…?

Seeing his prolonged silence, Alphys eventually just removed her glasses with one clawed hand and tiredly rubbed her face with the other.

“At least, PLEASE just tell me it worked.” she murmured weakly. “It looks like it did, but still…” Her look swiftly hardened. “Just so you know, I’m not gonna pretend I didn’t see you snatch that sandwich with that weird trick of yours.”

His bones rattled. Did she seriously consider telling on him…? “look, al, i really…”

She sighed again, her eyes dashing to the floor on her side as she appeared more conflicted; she seemed reluctant, but also relieved all at the same time, somehow? “… I know. A ’s gonna need it, right?”

Very subtle, Alphys.

Sans threw multiple terrified glances around them, but when he was convinced that no monster around them seemed to have heard her (she had thought of lowering her tone, at least), he took a second to sigh in relief before he sent her a death glare.

“ok, what was that one for? you really want us to get caught or what?” It took him some extra energy to stay intimidating while whispering these questions so that nobody else could accidentally eavesdrop.

The conflicted frown on her muzzle shook and distorted itself in a funny way. She tried to readjust her glasses back in place, but they shook a little before they regained their balance. “I… I don’t know. I’m sorry, I just… D-do we r-really need to keep that a s-secret from EVERYONE?”

His shoulders rattled slightly as he tensed even more. If her stuttering was back, then it could only mean that she cared deeply about that issue.

It was surprising at first to hear this confession coming from the very monster who had been keeping somewhat similar secrets for years. Almost… funnily ironic. Part of him almost wanted to make a joke from it, but he stopped himself from doing so at the last moment.

Maybe he shouldn’t point it out.

Maybe she, too, was tired of keeping secrets, after all.

He could understand that feeling.

“depends. you think you could tell them what really happened last month? that whatever happened, it doesn’t even matter at all?”

The answer was obvious. Yet, she found herself unable to say it. What was preventing them from telling everyone that instead of an actual human, the thing that had caused them so much pain and disaster was nothing more than a remote-controlled puppet? That the motive behind their misery was not even cruelty or madness, but just— the lack of knowledge from someone who thought they were playing a video game, and who genuinely believed that the lives they had stolen were not real?

What was stopping them from telling everyone that, chances were, the ones who had caused so much death and destruction were not so different from any of them? That just because they didn’t know any better… Had any monster been in their place, without knowing anything; would they have done the same thing without even realizing it?

Alphys thought of some of the most popular video games in the Underground. Not all of them were necessarily violent, but the monsters weren’t unfamiliar with this type of games either; she had even been asked to help create one of those Massively Multiplayer Online games, and although she wasn’t typically one to enjoy video games that much (she vastly preferred mangas and anime), she could understand the hype they created.

She thought back of how Undyne had sometimes spent some time on some of these video games, not only because she was using the excuse that she could use them as a means to create battle strategies, but also because she genuinely enjoyed them.

So now… How would she have reacted if, one day, she suddenly learned that one of these games actually impacted sentient people?

What was preventing them from telling everyone that they had been living the scenario of a video game? This sounded so easy to say. And all at the same time, this was such a painful revelation to receive. This was unbelievable not because it would seem scientifically absurd— way on the contrary, the theory that could explain how a video game could be controlling their world was so easy to understand. But this was unbelievable because nobody could easily accept that this could ever be the truth.

Such fact could be received with so many reactions, from anger to hopelessness. Especially after what had happened during the last month… Learning such truth could destroy so much. She knew it had had this effect on her.

Papyrus, Undyne, Mettaton, everyone…

They had all fought to their deaths. But all their inspiring, yet tragic heroism, had been for nothing.

Because there never was an ‘enemy’ in the first place.

Because this game could have restarted and erased all of their pain and memories at any point.

Because Sans’s plan involved doing exactly that.

Erasing everything, one last time.

“It doesn’t even matter at all.” What a terrible thing to say. What a horrible truth to keep.

She looked down. Sans was about to add something along the lines of “yeah, thought so.”, but he eventually decided against it.

“even you can’t accept it. not after what happened.” he muttered with a seemingly detached tone, but a compassionate look. “can you…?”

“I… I-I want to trust you. A-and I saw e-evidence that… t-they really d-don’t…” She cut herself short, trying to regain her composure. When she raised her eyes again to face him, they appeared so empty, yet paradoxically filled with a spark of undecipherable nature. “T-they r-really n-never want-ted this t-to h-happen. D-did they…?”

She looked about to cry. His shining pupils dimmed ever so slightly as they ran away from this disheartening view.

“don’t think dawn can speak for all of them, but… at least she understood the situation fast enough. judging by her expression, she’s…” He hesitated, trying to find the right words. How could he describe her? He hadn’t really known her for nearly long enough to judge her properly. “… well. she’s a person. that’s all there is to say. she’s a person with feelings, and a minimum of common sense. so she gets to understand how we feel, too.”

“Dawn… T-that’s her name, huh.” she caught on, repressing a stiff giggle. “How did she take the whole thing?”

“she, uh. well, it took her a while to just… believe it was happenin for real.” When he thought back of the first conversation he had with her, he chuckled for a bit. “you should’ve seen it. pretty funny in retrospect.”

Alphys’s muzzle shook a bit as she tried to laugh along, but the sad expression won over immediately. After a few seconds, the desperate look was replaced with a harsh frown.

“I just really hope you’ll keep that one under your watch.” she muttered edgily. “The other one caused enough pain as it was.”

The death glare she received from Sans made her shiver uncontrollably.

“Frisk would never have done any of this.”

The lizard gave him a dirty look. Even though she had been told that they weren’t actually responsible for what had happened, and that they weren’t even the one responsible for trapping their world in endless time loops… Part of her was still surprised that Sans would even keep calling that human by name despite everything that had happened because of them.

Maybe Sans had been able to forgive all of these humans, whether they came from their world or whether they were one of those ‘players’, but she knew for a fact that it couldn’t have been such an easy task for anyone else.

She knew the truth, and she was still struggling to forgive any of them. She wanted to, but the scars were still too fresh, and… She just didn’t feel ready to disregard her dearest friends’ deaths just yet. They had done so much… all in vain? How could she accept that? How could anyone accept that?

Part of her reasoned that the only reason Sans had been able to forgive everyone so easily was because he had been through so many timelines himself… Maybe he had simply stopped caring altogether. It is so much easier to forgive if you weren’t hurt in the first place.

Ever since she learned that he had been able to keep track of the time jumps sometime during the last month, Sans had always refused to tell her how many timelines he had been through, or what he had seen during those erased times. The only thing she knew was that at some point, they had made it all to the Surface, and that Sans’s plan involved replaying that timeline once more, at the very end.

Replaying it. As if it were just an act. A play he had learned to rehearse over and over, to the point where he had learned his part by heart and could do it in front of an audience without ever stuttering or having to actively work on his memory to remember his lines.

Or, under a different angle, maybe he simply saw it as an experiment whose results had become entirely predictable. Take those reactants, choose carefully the conditions of the reaction’s environment, and you will always obtain the same products with a complete certainty. After the stage of experiments, science always tries to make predictions, after all.

He had seen them all, repeating every day the same lines like a bunch of broken records, merely because they could not remember the other timelines like he did. He must be so tired of hearing the same ‘dialogue’ all over again… Maybe this very conversation they were having right now… How many times had he lived through it already?

He had seen them all die, only to come back to life a few hours later, over and over… Did he still feel anything when he saw one of them fall to that human? Did he still feel anything at all towards them, at this point…?

They were his family and friends, and she could tell that he still wanted to feel that way towards them, no matter what. But still, in the end of the day… Did he still care about them?

He had to care enough, or at least persuade himself that he cared, because of how hard he had worked on this project of his in order to save everyone. But then again… His plan involved restarting everything. His plan involved erasing this iteration. Erasing them. Erasing her.

Did he realize any of this? Probably not. Sometimes she felt selfish for thinking that he was the selfish one. He wanted to save them, after all. She was the one who thought that instead of saving them, he wanted to save a different iteration of them all.

Still, the facts were what they were. Sans probably saw things under a different perspective, but this was what it was: a perspective. Sans wanted to save all monsterkind; but in doing so, he was neglecting the ones who were still suffering around him, right at this very moment.

His plan involved denying that any of their pain had ever existed in the first place. It involved denying that Undyne had literally cheated death just to give everyone a chance to evacuate. It involved denying that Mettaton had willingly sacrificed himself for the sake of saving even more time. It involved denying that Papyrus had been willing to keep his purest views and put them to the ultimate test. It involved denying her own personal growth during this last month.

She did not want to go back to being the useless insecure nerd she used to be. She wanted to keep that confidence she had worked so hard to regain during this past month. She wanted to keep helping everyone, like she had always been expected to.

Of course she wanted to save everyone and see them all happy on the Surface. But… she wanted to be the one to live through it. Was that selfish? Was that being scared of death? Not death, technically. The time jump would not ‘kill’ her. It would just erase her memories and send her back to how she was one month earlier.

But… she really didn’t like who she was one month earlier. She had changed so much… She had started to wonder if the Alphys from last month was the same Alphys as she was now.

This was when she had realized…

Even though Sans genuinely cared about everyone, he did not care about them. Even though Sans cared about her, he really didn’t care about her, now.

When she raised a tired look towards him, she had so many questions to ask, so many things to say… But she could not find the words.

Instead, she finally noticed that at some point during her zoning out, Sans had pulled his phone out of his pocket and started checking it. When she gave him a questioning look, he merely said that he had received a text:

[ FROM: Grillby — 08:47 PM ]
Hey Sans. First time seeing you here since the beginning of the month. We haven’t met in a while, have we? We should hang out sometime. The bar isn’t available for now, but working in your basement all day must be lonely.
You look like you’re busy with the Royal Scientist so I won’t bother. Give me a sign whenever you want to chat.

The skeleton looked up in the crowd, and soon found the fire elemental with his head risen and locked on him. They shared a look. The former barman rose a fiery hand and made a silent wave from afar. Sans returned it with a light chuckle.

“heh. it’s true we haven’t talked in forever. i actually miss them…”

Alphys observed him discreetly, trying not to let him notice that she was watching. While Sans was usually hard to read, and while she was not usually that good at studying people’s expressions, her curiosity was just that strong, and he tended to drop his mask much more easily when he was distracted by something and forgot everything that stood around him.

A wave of sadness rushed over his skull as he stared back at his cell phone. No, not exactly sadness… Was it nostalgia? It appeared that the one who had sent him this message was someone he was attached to, at least to some extent… but according to his words, it was someone he had not had the chance to talk to in so long. He missed talking with them.

He looked obviously conflicted, as if wondering whether he should answer or not. Did he want to interact with this iteration of his friend, or did he want to wait for the next one so he could have this chat without it getting erased afterwards…?

After a few dozen seconds, the monster’s left bony thumb started typing. Apparently he had made his mind.

[ FROM: Sans — 08:49 PM ]
sure, it’d be nice to make up for lost time.
i’ll prolly see you some other day. maybe lunch.

When he closed his cell phone and shove it back in one of his shorts’ pockets, Alphys judged it was the best moment to carry on with the conversation. But all at the same time… She was not sure she actually wanted to discuss about their former topic so much. There were different matters that were just as important, that she believed they should tackle as soon as possible.

“So… What are your plans from now on?” she asked with a casual tone, but a stern intent and an anxious look. “You can’t exactly work on your machine AND make sure she won’t get in trouble at the same time, can you?”

“heh. to be honest, i stopped counting the times she said she wanted to help, actually. not sure yet if i’ll take her on that offer, but… she just might be useful. ‘sides, it’d be a nice way to keep an eye on her and work faster all at the same time.”

She hummed, deep in thought yet paying much attention to his words and expressions. She looked skeptical and worried. If anything, the idea of a human offering to help fix an intricate and potentially dangerous machine made her feel extremely suspicious; yet the fact that Sans seemed to brush this suspicion off as if it should be entirely irrelevant made her at least try to reconsider.

He was usually so much more cautious than she was… or at least he was handling his secrets much better than she did. That, or maybe he had just stopped caring altogether due to all these time loops… Until he didn’t anymore.

Was that making sense?

Sans’s behavior during this last month had been… puzzling, to say the least. For years they had grown used to seeing him nihilistic and careless, supposedly because of how any time jump that could occur would erase everything they would do and none of them would even remember what had happened.

Ironically… this used to be his behavior, until he had actually started remembering the time jumps; from that point onwards, well, admittedly she had only been able to see the last iteration of it, but the change in him between the beginning of this loop and how he was behaving just ‘the day before’ was baffling.

From lazy and depressed, literally from one day to the other, he had become so desperate… This desperation had led him to get on the move as soon as he had found the dimmest glimmer of hope.

He had stopped caring… up to the point when the events made him care again.

This was so… strange. And yet, this was the only way she could explain it. Then again, what could she hope to understand of him, from that pitifully shallow view she had of the events? Who knew how many timelines had been squished between the first day of this loop and ‘the day before’? Who knew, maybe he had been trapped in time loops for years, and this sudden change in behavior had not been nearly so sudden at all.

Speaking of time loops…

“I’m still wondering… What made you think that these… ‘players’ would necessarily have the ability to time jump?”

Sans’s skull tilted in surprise, as if he had not expected that she would ask. Had he forgotten to tell her? Maybe he had.

“well, that one’s easy.” he chuckled absent-mindedly, looking in the distance and displaying a small smile. “she comes from a world where there’s hardly any magic at all. so, in order for their souls to be stable enough to sustain themselves… they naturally need more determination to just, well, survive.” He shrugged. “i made some measurements and all, and theoretically their souls should be around four times stronger than a human soul from here. should be more than enough to do the trick.”

Alphys’s soul sank. The human Sans had brought was four times stronger than a regular one. Was he nuts…?!

But… the deed was done. There was no more going back now, no matter how much she thought this should be the wiser solution for now.

“I… T-that would explain it.” she sighed, sneaking her clawed fingers underneath her glasses and rubbing her closed eyes in tired circled motions. “B-but Sans, do you just realize w-what bringing one here would…” She readjusted her glasses and sent him a scolding, yet terrified look. “S-she’s just a d-doomsday-enhancing ha-hazard, now!”

It didn’t help that he had slowly raised a pair of fully darkened pupils to face her. The plainly aware look he was giving her was all the more reassuring.

“i know. that’s why i really need you to hush it. no one can know, and especially not asgore. i mean, if he got her and absorbed her soul along with the other six…” His eye-sockets twitched in an eerie way, as if he were about to make a joke. “need a little help here. what’s above godliness?”

Oh, you wouldn’t know.

The silence that engulfed them was only covered by the sounds of all the other monsters surrounding them, oblivious as ever. Alphys suddenly started to feel them as potential menaces, worried that any of them could have heard even one word of their talk…

Maybe Sans was right. She definitely should have tried to find a different setting, if they were to discuss something so dangerous.

That is, if there were anything else to discuss; judging from how Sans stood up from his seat and addressed her a short glance before leaving, it seemed obvious that to him, the conversation was over. He was getting near a much less crowded, much darker place; the perfect setting if he wanted to take a shortcut and disappear without anyone noticing. Did he really intend to leave her like this, right after saying something like that?!

“S-Sans, wait!” she stumbled away from her seat and half walked, half trotted after him. Fortunately, when he heard her, he stopped and turned around, although he looked annoyed. When she stopped to quickly catch her breath, she found that for a few seconds she had forgotten her words… So instead of what she had probably meant to say at first, she blabbered: “Can I come with you?”

There was a pause. Then, Sans’s sockets squinted humorously, as if he weren’t sure he had heard her right. “… what?”

She hesitated, having just realized what she had said. “I-I mean… You look like you haven’t had some proper rest in a while. You barely had any time to come here before today! So now that you can take some time for yourself, y-you’ll need someone else to look after her, so y-you can at least relax a bit…”

That much was true, at least. During the entire month, Sans had been so reclusive and absorbed in his thoughts; it was obvious that he was completely absorbed in his project, to such extent that Sans, of all people, had started to neglect his sleep. Well, it was not certain that he had neglected his sleep, but now that she could see him for the first time in so long, it was at least obvious that he looked a lot more tired than usual. And after that achievement from earlier… No matter whether he was tired or not, he definitely deserved his rest, if only for one evening.

After a few seconds of silence, the skeleton seemed to have thought through a similar argument, because he ended up smiling and shrugged jokingly.

“you know what? you’re right. i kinda miss my bed. haven’t seen it during the last fourteen hours, you realize that?”

She rolled her eyes teasingly. “Exactly what I’m saying. If you keep going like that, you just MIGHT cure that laziness of yours. Next step, you’re gonna make it snow in Hotland.”

For the first time, they laughed together, from a genuine laugh. It did not last for long, but the feeling remained. When Sans stretched an open hand, Alphys gladly seized it, and they both disappeared, only to reappear in a lit living room at the outskirts of Snowdin Town.

“So… Where is she now?” Alphys asked, turning her head around and looking for any trace of what could be a living being in the house… And then, the realization hit her. “W-wait, y-you ACTUALLY left a human without supervision, i-in your house, for…”

He leisurely glanced at the watch on his left wrist. “… one hour twenty minutes. could be worse.” Sans looked amused by the scientist’s terrified attitude. “what, you were worried she’d burn the house down while i was gone?” He fell silent for a few short seconds when he took some time to look around. “… looks pretty clean, actually. huh. definitely not as good as papyrus, but, not bad.”

The door behind them opened swiftly, as a humming brunette obliviously walked in, closed the door behind her path, turned back towards the direction she intended to follow— and stopped in shock as she met face to face with not one, but two monsters, who each turned around to face her with a pair of surprised expressions.

When her stare crossed the human’s, Alphys’s eyes tripled in size. The human blinked while staring at her, sent a quick interrogative look at Sans, then went back to stare at the lizard again. She tried to show a patient smile and greet her happily, but the monster stiffened and very obviously tried to refrain from stepping back. Upon seeing her unease, Dawn carefully stepped back to leave her some space. The scientist seemed to appreciate the gesture, as she trembled at first, but eventually cracked a small and shy smile.

“… H-h-hiya. S-so you’re… t-the human, right?” Well, duh.

The poor Alphys seemed to be completely petrified by her view. When she tried to imagine what she must have gone through during this timeline, the human easily understood where that came from. Why did Sans bring her here in the first place…? Dawn sent another glance at the skeleton, silently asking for his permission before she would make any move or raise her voice at all. She was met with an absolute indifference; it wasn’t really that he seemed to not give a care in the world, but rather that he was enjoying the view way too much to help her in any way. Jerk.

“It… depends on w-which one you’re talking about.” she eventually answered, whispering in a carefully soft tone, trying to sound as reassuring as possible. “D-do you know everything about…?” Wait, stupid question. What if Sans had wanted to keep that a secret? Great way to bust it, really, congratulations.

“… Y-yeah.” the lizard muttered, avoiding her look but actively keeping an eye out for any subtle movement. “I-I know ab-bout the video game.”

Oh. This explained that. “I… see.”

If awkwardness could be tangible, one would have needed a full arsenal of blades in order to cut through this jungle of uneasy embarrassment.

“she insisted on coming.” Sans shrugged, pointing the lizard with a lazy thumb. Then, he casually walked towards the stairs, sending them a lazy wave with his left hand without looking at them. “you two have fun. i’ll go catch some z’s.”

“Uh— S-Sans, wait…!” Alphys cowered a bit in response to the human’s sudden outburst, but she was ignored for the time being. When Sans sent Dawn a silent nod, asking her to tell him what she had in mind, she quickly obliged: “I was just thinking, for tomorrow. What time did you plan to get up? It’s just that… I can put an alarm on my phone so I can be ready whenever you want.”

The skeleton blinked in utter bafflement. She sure was taking the initiative in a lot of things.

“uh… i didn’t have any plans, but… how ‘bout eight thirty? ‘s that good?”

“Sure!” she smiled, already typing on her odd white rectangle again. “It’s okay if you change your mind, I just wanted to get an idea.”

Alphys gave her a suspicious look, although she tried to hide her wariness.

“So y-you’re really going to assist him?”

She gave her a sheepish grin. “Technically, he still didn’t say anything. But it’s really up to him. I’d love to help, but I totally understand if you don’t trust me.”

They looked up at Sans, who just shrugged with that “i seriously couldn’t care less” attitude. Then he merely said that he’d decide on the next day, and resumed his walk up the stairs.

“A-actually, Sans! I-I’ll help you too. W-with the machine. Tomorrow.” Alphys stuttered. “The CORE’s been fixed, so, t-the other engineers s-should be fine without me. I’ll just send them a message tomorrow morning. A-Asgore will probably be happy if I say I’ll be working with you.”

There was a long silence. The human looked at her with surprise, but she also appeared somewhat reassured. Surely she knew enough to realize that an actual scientist was a lot more competent to assist him; that, or she just thought that three pairs of hands would be more efficient than only one or two. But then again, the final decision only fell on Sans, also known as the most indecisive guy who would be ready to refrain from giving his decision if it could cause some mild yet hilarious annoyance, as long as it could not be responsible for any actually unfortunate consequences. That troll.

In the end… He just shrugged. Again.

“sure. g’night.”

He really was doing that on purpose. This last time the girls were to ask him something, when Alphys stopped him as he was on the verge of opening the door leading to his bedroom, part of her only did it to annoy him in return.

“H-hey, Sans. I know you want to have some peace now, but just before you do that, d-didn’t you forget something?” Sans grudgingly sighed before turning a pair of silent but glaring eye-sockets towards her. “I thought you’d taken a second ration for her.”

He shook his skull as if what he had just heard was nothing but a nonsensical and utterly stupid waste of time.

He merely said:

“in the kitchen.”

And then he disappeared through his room’s door.

Curious, Alphys, who was the one closer to the room in question, opened the door leading to it and stared: right in front of her gaze, a packed sandwich was patiently waiting, obviously displayed in the middle of the table.

She face-palmed, sighing.

“… I hate it when he does that.”

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“So… What were y-you doing outside?”

It had only taken a split second after the human’s appearance to notice that the hoodie she was wearing was not originally hers; and right after Sans had left, it seemed that the human in question had finally been reminded of that fact, as Alphys watched her remove it and slightly blush in embarrassment.

She sort of acted like a scared child or animal after being caught doing something they knew they should have refrained from doing, as if she were surprised, but not that much, that she was now given The Stare in response to her misdeeds. This was the look of the cat witnessing their owner come back home, and who watched warily yet guiltily because the owner was blocking its only exit and the cat was anticipating the moment the owner would notice what exactly it had done with the curtains in the living room.

Alphys liked cats. She wished she could have one, but sadly she could only know of them from how they were depicted in her favorite anime and other shows. From what she knew, these creatures were adorable, but sneaky and treacherous. And incredibly self-centered.

… Looks like they’re stuck on the awkward train. Great.

Honestly, it was beyond her how Sans had not even made the slightest remark about having her take some of his belongings without asking for his permission. Maybe he really did care that little about letting her do whatever she pleases. Part of her wanted to do the same, especially since she knew the context and kept trying to remind herself that this human was not supposed to be that dangerous… But how could they know that for sure?

The human gave her a nervous and somewhat guilty look, and then immediately went to put the jacket neatly on the coatrack next to the entry door — probably the exact place where she had originally found it. Alphys tried to stay on guard… But it seemed that what Sans had said was true. This human had some proper manners, at least.

“I finished cleaning about thirty minutes ago. At first I thought I’d just wait for Sans to come back, but… This place just feels too sad and weird when nobody’s there.” she finally answered, a sheepish and shy smile trembling on her face. Totally a cat thing to do. “So I just borrowed a jacket and left a note on the TV in case he came back while I was out. I just thought I’d go take a walk in a place where it’s… normal to feel lonely.”

Alphys thought briefly of the places that could possibly fit this description and wouldn’t have required anyone to teleport in order to effectively reach them in a reasonable amount of time.

“You mean Waterfall?” she asked, lifting a non-amused eyebrow.

Dawn bit her bottom lip, averting the lizard’s gaze but soon nodding tensely. “Yeah. That was the plan at first, but then I realized it’d take much longer than I had planned, so… I turned around before I actually reached it.”

The reasoning was sound, and she looked perfectly honest, albeit a bit too shy for Alphys to completely disregard the possibility that she might be hiding something from her. But judging from her general demeanor…

Yes, it still seemed more likely that this human was restraining her movements and carefully choosing her words because of a kind yet somewhat awkward intent to appear as harmless as possible in order to break the ice as much as she could, more than because of something that would truly be malice.

“This place is a lot bigger than I anticipated… I would’ve loved to keep going at least until I reached the beginning of Waterfall, I always wondered what it’d look like in real life— it already looks gorgeous in the game… B-but I didn’t want Sans to worry. I’m sure he’s already got a lot on his mind, and he’s already been through so much… the last thing I’d want to do is bring him even more trouble.”

The human was not looking at anything anymore. She seemed to talk just for the sake of saying more things. Maybe there was that hope that the more she talked and said things to make herself look harmless and nice, the more she would manage to overcome the awkwardness.

She was still being very careful with her words, either because she wanted to be sure that she would not accidentally say something that would upset her due to her knowledge of specifically intimate details regarding her and the other ‘characters’ of that video game, or because she wanted to look as innocent and gentle as possible until the right moment to attack was found. It looked more and more like the former, thankfully; but then again, what exactly was the difference between the two? The body language would be identical, since in both cases the goal was the same: make her interlocutor lower her guard.

“So it’s true. You really know every-thing there’s to know about this place.” The scientist’s look hardened warily. “Everything there is to know about us personally.”

“W-well… Y-y-yeah. I’m… sorry?”

Ugh. Will you two just get this over with already.

The monster shook her head heavily without looking at her, mumbling under her breath that there was no point in apologizing about this sort of thing and that they should just go to the kitchen because she should eat her dinner and since they were about to have a long chat anyway then she preferred to have the possibility to sit down.

Dawn did not find anything to say in order to either agree or object with her, so she merely followed her guidance and took a seat on the opposite side of the table. She still wasn’t feeling hungry enough yet, so the size of the sandwich intimidated her just a bit; however, the pleasant smell certainly made her want to at least give it a try.

Besides, hey! This was her chance to taste some monster food, wasn’t it? As it turned out, at least at first, this really tasted mostly like regular food— only one real difference was noticeable. There was this slight tingling sensation in her mouth, almost like some small sparks of static electricity, even though it really was different than that…

Strangely enough, it did not feel nearly as uncomfortable as her words made it sound like, way on the contrary; it was almost like a fifth taste that her body was not naturally able to feel or interpret correctly, and due to her inability to feel this taste properly, her brain was simply making up some kind of mystical impulse in order to grasp its nature as best as it could.

The taste of magic, probably. How stupid is that, ha.

The strangest part was when, as she swallowed, she felt the entirety of what she had intuitively assumed to be fully solid matter… merely dissolve into thin air, somewhere between her throat and her stomach. Oh well, part of her had actually been somewhat expecting this from what had been theorized by the fandom anyway.

When she raised her eyes and noticed that Alphys was still there and watching her in complete silence, she tried to thank her with a warm smile— but the scientist merely answered that Sans had been the one responsible for bringing it in the first place. Awkward.

“Do you… want some?” the human asked tentatively, handing the sandwich closer to her.

“I already had dinner. Thanks.”

… Welp. She really was not making it easy to build a constructive conversation, was she?

Did she do something wrong? Was it because she was a human? Was it because she was a complete stranger to her but just so happened to know everyone already because of a game? Was it because she was the ‘Anomaly’ responsible for the Resets…?

Just do something to break the ice already, geez!

Admittedly, since Sans had forgiven her and all the other players so easily… She had sort of assumed that everyone else would either not know about the situation, or be even more okay with it than he had been. If anyone had the most rights to feel hurt and angry at them, it had to be him; the fact that Alphys would give her the cold shoulder like that… She really had not expected anything like this.

Then again, if Alphys of all characters people was acting like this… It had to mean that she had been hurt as well. Even though she was not sure by what exactly, she at least had a list of guesses, and she certainly felt the urge to amend to whatever pains she had unwillingly inflicted.

“L-look, I’m… I’m pretty sure saying that will mean nothing by now, but…” She inhaled sharply in order to increase her confidence and look more serious when she raised her grave eyes towards her. “I’m really sorry for what the game’s been doing to all of you. Whether in this timeline or in the other ones…”

“It’s okay.” she answered hastily, but she was avoiding her look. “I… I know you probably wouldn’t have done something like this if you knew. You wouldn’t have gone to… that extent, at least.”

“Everybody here is so sweet. Of course nobody in their right minds would want to wish pain or death on people like you.” Dawn murmured with a sad smile. “I’m glad Sans found a way to end it and give you a true happy ending.” She paused, but soon added with a brighter smile: “All of you.”

“We… we’re not there yet.”

“Ha, ha… Sorry, you’re right. Sans said it’d take a few weeks before the machine’s ready.” And honestly? The wait had to be unbearable.

How hard had it to feel like to be stuck in a Near-Genocide ending where everyone they cared about was long dead, just so they could save them later…?

There was nothing to worry about because they would succeed; but this was so unfair nonetheless… Sans, Alphys, everyone, they had to miss everybody so much, and they still had to wait, only to be greeted with people that would never acknowledge what they would have gone through, or even that they had been saved from a horrible fate through these heartbreaking hardships?

Heck, she had never had the chance to meet them in person, and yet she missed them already.

“… I wish everyone could be here with us. I know it won’t even matter in the end because the Reset will bring them back, but I still wish they could be alive and well right now, and…”

The human let her last sentence linger on the tip of her tongue as, when she raised her bittersweet gaze towards the lizard, she lost both her nostalgic smile and her words.

“And what?” Alphys asked coldly, as her harsh yet conflicted and shy look behind her glasses would dare scold nothing but the floor. “That you could’ve “befriended” them? This is what you’re all interested in, isn’t it? To finally get to meet them too?”

Before the human could find the energy and words to move her lips in a coherent way, her eyes remained stuck gawking at the view: the way Alphys was glaring without daring to meet her eyes directly… A lot of words could have tried to describe it individually, without quite grasping its deepest intent. This glare was stern, but not aggressive; hurtful, but not mean-spirited.

“I know this must be hard in your specific situation, but you need to get real.” she added after just a split second, with a mystical tone that entirely fit with the meaning behind her eyes. Mysterious and full of wonder… but ruthless. “You’re not the self-insert protagonist from a cheesy fanfiction, so stop acting like it. We’re not prizes you get when you complete “side-quests” in a game.”

She gaped. “O-of course you’re not! I know you’re real, now. And that’s exactly because of that…”

“That’s it, huh…? Because we’re not just pixels anymore, you want to take your chance and live your own adventure here?” The lizard wearily spat a morose, yet bitter cackle. “Why do you want to help us so badly? Because you know us from the game? Because we’re “celebrities” where you come from? Because if anyone believes you when you’re back home, you’ll get to brag about it?”

“What— No!”

“Then why? If you’re so sure, then why are you so interested in helping random strangers who basically just ripped you from everything you’ve ever known, including your own universe?!” Alphys’s outburst struck like thunderbolt. “If your reason is not because you’d “already know us” from the video game, then I don’t want to know how long your naivety would’ve lasted in the hands of any other criminals.”

“You— you’re not criminals!” the human jerked, offended and heart-struck.

“And what tells you that?!” she shrieked. “We’ve just met! You don’t know us!”

A long silence fell. When she felt her limbs start to shake, Alphys realized that, in the heat of the moment, she had stood up in a jolt; yet, she decided to stay perfectly still and watch: soon, she noticed exactly what kind of face was hiding on the opposite side of the table.

Hiding, indeed. The human had left her seat and was now almost entirely made invisible due to her hiding spot between the chair and the table, with just the top half of her head and the tips of her fingers still daring to sneak their way above the table. The only reason this half head was still sticking out was probably out of nothing but mere courtesy, as the turmoil roaring in her eyes contained a deluge of emotions, none of which could raise her confidence or reassure her from the glowing thunderstorm raging right in front of her.

Alphys slowly realized that she had let her magic out.

From a monster’s perspective, this kind of behavior was rarely ever considered to be something to be truly reckoned with. In most cases, a monster’s inability to control their magic when overwhelmed by emotions was undeniable evidence of this monster’s inexperience when it came to actually handling their magic in a precise and calculated way; the fact that no real bullets were present only proved Alphys’s lack of power and actual intent.

Still; seeing the look on the human’s face, one did not need to know much about her species’ culture to deduce that she definitely did not see this situation under the same perspective. Besides, Alphys knew the basics of human biology and electricity’s effects on their body; she doubted her ridicule sparks could be truly harmful unless she were to put her all into them, but she guessed that they probably looked intimidating enough as they were.

The scientist immediately lost the scowl on her muzzle and slowly went back to sitting at the kitchen table, slightly trembling. The air kept crackling with little white sparks for a few more seconds, but they soon died down when the curvy spines in the back of her head gradually deflated back to their usual position. She kept blinking forcedly a few more times, until the electric color in her eyes calmed down as well.

“I… I-i’m sorry I lashed out like this. I had a long day.” she muttered apologetically. “I’m sorry I scared you. I lost it a little, but, I’m not actually going to hurt you. I promise.”

The human waited for one more second, just to ensure that everything had calmed down enough; but soon, she gulped, nodded, then slowly and shakily, but surely made her way back on her seat.

“I-I never thought you’d…” She shook her head immediately, nervously interrupting her sentence. “S-sorry, that’s not how I should put it… What I wanted to say was…” She stopped again; she tried to turn a few words in her mind, but sadly, only one conclusion could be drawn after she achieved almost a full minute of silence: “… There really isn’t any way I can make it sound like I wasn’t about to compare you with how you’re depicted in the game. I’m sorry.”

“It’s… I-it’s okay.” Alphys repeated one more time, sighing. “I’m sure you can’t help it, especially if you’ve known the game for a while. How long does it make for you?”

“O-oh, uh… I-it must’ve been a bit less than half a year by now. I think.” Dawn took a short moment to reminisce the details. “I mean, I knew it existed before that, since my best friend kept telling me about it until I gave in and asked her what it was about. She’d even started chatting about it at school, of all times. That’s just how determined she was.” She paused to repress a little chuckle, mumbling humorously for herself: “_{Ha. Determined.}”

Alphys froze, then blinked in what appeared to be a mixture between shock and very slow, horror-inducing realization. “S-school…?”

Dawn rose a confused face with wide eyes. “Oh, yeah. I’m in high school. You… know what it is, right? Do you guys have a different education system or…?”

“N-no, but, I just…” She fidgeted stressfully. “H-h-how o-old are you…?”

The human stared blankly. “… Fifteen?”

This single word had the same effect as lightning. Alphys’s muzzle trembled in an even more nervous way than before, to such extent that her glasses seemed to fall out. She buried her head in her clawed hands, her elbows heavily resting on the table.

“… You’re just a teenager. You’re not wearing stripes so I just assumed, but… Oh God. I’m talking existential crisis material with a kid. _{And I lashed out.}”

… Apparently she had assumed that she was a lot older than she really was. This fact confused Dawn even further at first, because strangers sometimes mistook her for a twelve-year-old, but never for an adult. However, she soon remembered just how much monsters knew about humans in the first place— that was to say, hardly anything. She would have expected Alphys to know the difference due to her watching so much anime, but then again… Maybe she just didn’t know how to compare voluntarily exaggerated drawings with their real life counterparts.

Part of her felt a little offended that the lizard would call her a kid in the exact way she was saying it, but then again, she had to admit that this whole talk they had was, for the most part, flying over her head, or just giving her a headache. She could understand that Alphys had been hurt because of the video game being real, but… What was that thing about “prizes” all about? She just wanted to get to know these guys better and have the chance to potentially be their…

Oh, that was it, wasn’t it? That thing about befriending them just for… the ‘pride’ of getting to know famous, magic ‘characters’ that everybody thought to be fictional but who eventually turned out to be real. The ‘pride’ of saying that you knew a celebrity personally, times ten.

She wasn’t doing it for pride, was she? These guys were real. They had their own lives. All she wanted was to… What was she doing it for? If she had been kidnapped by any other kinds of magical creatures like aliens she didn’t know, or whom she would have known beforehand to be hostile, would she have reacted the same way? Absolutely not.

… Maybe Alphys had a point.

“I… I was just surprised, don’t worry… It’s a-alright if you needed to get some stuff out of your chest, too. I’m sure it must’ve been hard for you to… learn that you’re a video game character or whatever… That’s some crazy stuff. I h-have no idea what it must feel like for you… I-I’m sorry I made you feel that way.” Dawn murmured uneasily. “I-I think I’m starting to understand what you meant about acting like I know everyone and all, too… I c-can’t exactly help it s-so I wouldn’t want to make any promises, but I’ll do my best to… p-pretend I don’t know you? I-I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to do actually, b-but…”

“You don’t have to do anything, I’m the one who lost it.” Alphys assured, shaking her head vehemently. “I mean, you just got kidnapped. I guess I can’t completely blame you for clinging to what you know of the game… Of course you’d try to feel at home with us so you’ll better cope with the stress or something. I’m sure that if you didn’t know anything about us or this place… You’d probably freak out for days. Magic and monsters don’t exist in your world, right? Sans told me so.”

The human lowered her eyes and absent-mindedly gazed in the distance as if she could look past the table; but the slow and heavy nod she soon made showed that she was fully listening.

“Truth be told, I… I guess I was projecting a bit. Y-you probably know that, but… I’m k-kinda the craziest monster around when it comes to getting fond of fictional stories and whatnot. So when I learned about the game… Of course I started making some wild fantasies and thought about things like, h-how I’d react if one day I was the one who got kidnapped by the characters from my favorite anime.”

The human nearly said “It’s Mew Mew: Kissy Cutie, right?” by reflex, but fortunately managed to stop this thought from being uttered. Of course it was Mew Mew: Kissy Cutie, the game made it clear enough (although it was unclear whether it was a dating simulation game or an actual anime — both versions probably existed). There was no use saying this out loud other than just increasing the awkwardness and making Alphys uncomfortable for no reason; other than by just being the stupidest and smoothest Captain Obvious that could ever be.

Alphys was not looking at her anymore, so she did not notice anything that had ever transpired through her interlocutor’s head.

“I…’m not exactly sure I would’ve handled things the way I should, either. But I got to think about it. So… I know things must already be hard for you, and I’m sure that thinking of your situation as just “getting the chance to meet the game’s characters” is tempting and the most reassuring option you have… But if you can— please just try to consider this.” she muttered softly, but shyly and uncomfortably. “I’ll repeat just one more time… We’re not your prizes. We’ll just be neighbors for some time.” Her look swiftly shifted as she cracked a small, bittersweet smile: “I must admit, part of me was actually excited to meet someone like you— I have so many questions about your world and that video game, I swear that you are NOT ready.”

A small, yet genuine and somewhat mischievous giggle escaped her, and its honesty was contagious enough that soon, Dawn found herself laughing as well for an instant.

“Anyway… I’d really like to be your friend, eventually. It could be a lot of fun. But… I’d just really like it if that friendship could be because of something other than the game, you know? I mean… I g-guess I like to think that I could make real friends all by myself, instead of because of my status or something… I d-don’t know.”

When silence fell in the kitchen, Dawn was left to ponder a little more the lizard’s words; it seemed so intricate, she was struggling to try and make some sense out of it.. She just knew that there were some hidden ambiguities concealed within the monster’s speech that could explain just how deeply she cared about that issue and why she would have bothered to speak for so long about it… But at least, she thought she easily had the gist of it and could understand where that came from.

She wondered whether wanting to befriend someone you literally met for the first time but grew to know very intimately because you saw that person through a screen and got to learn nearly everything about that person, was what being a creep or even a stalker was all about. It probably was. Even if she hadn’t done that on purpose because she was certain these people were fictive at first, the result was the same.

“I… I don’t think I got everything you wanted to tell me with this, but I’ll do my best to be careful.” she answered with a sheepish smile.

“It’s okay, I probably didn’t say it in the clearest way either. I’m still not sure how to say all of this anyway, so… I’m really just glad that you wanted to listen, at least.” Alphys dismissed lightly. “You’ve probably had a lot on your mind too, right?”

“Oh yeah, totally.” the teenager sighed in exhaustion. “I’m completely new to all this magic and soul stuff and now time travel and I’m still trying to wrap my head around a lot of things with you guys being more than just video game characters, and all at the same time I don’t want to be a burden to any of you because I know from the game how much stuff you’ve all been through, but now I have to be careful because acting like I know this stuff and want to help you guys as if I’ve known you for ages is making you uncomfortable, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid and why I wanted to just be nice and helpful with you in the first place so you wouldn’t have to deal with me bringing you guys trouble…” There was another sigh, even longer and heavier than the previous one. She buried her head in her hands and took some time to breathe, until she admitted: “… My head hurts.”

The scientist repressed a short, yet soft and warm laugh, as she watched the human with a satisfied and an almost, somewhat motherly look. Maybe more like the look of that protective big sister. In any case, it didn’t last for long, as she soon stood up from her chair, opened a cupboard, took out a glass and went to the sink. When Dawn was alerted by the sound of the running water, she noticed with surprise that the height of the sink was completely normal. Wasn’t there something in the game about that sink being insanely high so Papyrus could stack more bones in the cupboard below or something…? Oh who cared, she was too tired to play the ‘seven mistakes’ game. Maybe the sink was magic. Everything was magic here anyway.

Soon, Alphys handed her a glass full of cold water and a joking, yet caring smile. The human thanked her sincerely yet tiredly and took her time to empty it. It entirely evaporated as soon as she swallowed it, but at least it did seem to have some relieving effect on her headache.

Even the water counted as magic food. What the heck.

“… This place is weird.” she laughed incredulously. “It’s amazing, and I know I shouldn’t be expecting anything less, but it’s weird. I have so many questions about everything.”

“Same here. Take your time.” the scientist added jokingly, nodding in a mockingly solemn and wise gesture. “What aren’t you getting yet?”

“I’m just… not really sure? I mean, it looks so simple. I got kidnapped because the video game that exists in my world is affecting this one, and me being here can stop it. I really don’t know what else I should be getting from the situation apart from, well, the fact that you guys need me to stay here for some time until you’ve solved the problem once and for all.” She blinked slowly, then inhaled sharply through her nose, pursing her lips tightly. “But all at the same time, a lot of this situation just… doesn’t make that much sense to me.”

Alphys blinked blankly. “How so?”

“It’s probably ‘cause my best friend is a huge science nerd and she’s always saying stuff like ‘time travel doesn’t exist’ or whatever, so with that and magic being a thing here… I guess I still need to adjust to my mind being blown in more ways than just one.” She took a small pause to let a small yet bright and incredulous giggle escape her lips. “Right now, honestly, everything that happened sounds like the sort of stuff that’d happen in a bad shipping fanfiction or something. You even said it yourself.”

As if taken by a sudden fateful doubt, or as if she had just been stricken with the realization of just who she had been saying this to, the human’s face suddenly fell as she gave an almost fearful look at what she very well knew to be an otaku as well as an obsessive fanfiction writer who, if rumors were to be trusted, was leaning towards the cheesy romantic stories at best, the smut crackfics at worst.

“Please don’t ship me with anyone I don’t know how old anyone is here but I’m really just fifteen and in my country it’s illegal.” The realization of what she had just said struck once more, and part of her felt incredibly embarrassed and unclean for even having merely thought of this possibility on her own. Maybe she had been reading too many of those fanfics herself and had been corrupted by the fandom. She immediately face-palmed. “_{Uuugh, why did I say that…}”

Dawn was pulled out of her thoughts when she heard a repressed yet somewhat sly and mocking giggle.

“S-sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Alphys brought a small slightly trembling fist to the end of her muzzle and forced a cough, avoiding her look. “T-there really are that many fanfics in your world? Ones about… THIS happening, even?”

Call it whatever you like, I call it a show. A very boring sitcom for now, at that. I hope there’ll be at least some action to spice things up at some point.

“Uhhh…” Okay, what was anyone supposed to answer to that? This joke was getting slightly too meta for her own sanity and part of her was just starting to consider the possibility, and the idea of the existential crisis it induced wasn’t pleasant, to say the least. “… K-kinda? Well, usually most of the fanfics I’ve seen that turn around that sort of dumb plot choose a… b-better setting. Like, you guys are already on the surface or at least you’re all a-alive. A-anyway most of the fanfics where Sans actually does something productive, end up in him getting paired with someone, so, uh, I usually avoid to read those ones. And I promise I’m not saying this just because you’re here.”

Alphys rolled her eyes jokingly. “Hey, don’t worry. This is real life here, you’re safe from that sort of weird fan fantasies.”

“Please don’t take this the wrong way, but somehow hearing this from a video game character doesn’t help at all.” the human retorted sarcastically, raising her eyebrows in an unamused expression yet smirking in a mixture between a joking intent, and pure disbelief. “No offense, but reality looks totally broken to me right now.”

The scientist exploded in loud laughs, and soon Dawn followed. The concert lasted for at least a few minutes, until exhaustion had the better of them and their respective needs for breathing took over their hilarity.

“Anyway… Sans didn’t tell me all that much about how it went.” Alphys eventually said. “How did you two… handle the situation?”

“… I was stupid. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it.” the human muttered sheepishly. “Craziest thing is, Sans thought at first that I was lying to his face and being an evil manipulator or something, while it was all really just a big misunderstanding. So… that was awkward. I’m just glad it’s solved now.”

Alphys repressed a small laugh once more, but maybe they had just laughed too much and they had now both exhausted their laughing batteries.

“Anyway, it’s… weird. Before I came here and all, at first I felt bad for him as, like, a character, because of what he’s going through and all, but then when I got to see what the fandom did to him and how big a deal he’d become, I g-guess I kinda started to think he was… overrated?” She marked a pause to look down and bit her lip shamefacedly. “N-now that I know that it was all real, though… I-i really feel bad about thinking that.”

Oh good, when she was acting so docile I thought she was just going to be one of those mindless fangirls that do nothing but follow him around like a little puppy.

“He’s being so nice, and… hopeful?” She blinked in confusion. “I really just want him to succeed. He deserves to reach that happy ending and then be left in peace for the rest of his life, the poor guy.” Dawn suddenly stopped her train of thoughts and froze when she saw the peculiar look on Alphys’s face. “… What? Did I say something wrong?”

Wait. That wasn’t the “You said something wrong and now my SOUL is broken due to the existential crisis” look. That was a smug look.

“Oh no, it’s not what you said. It’s just… he showed me your internet some time when he was trying to tell me about the video game.”

Dawn’s eyes widened in shock and horror. “You— you guys saw… the fandom?”

“Not much, sadly.” Alphys muttered dejectedly. “Sans wanted to convince me that he wasn’t just pulling my leg with that story of time travels and video game stuff, so eventually he just turned on his machine, connected his computer to one of your browsers, told me to search for the word ‘Undertale’ and said that it’d give me all the answers I needed.”

“Oh… ouch. He didn’t even try to be tactful with it…?”

“I really was annoying him and he probably thought I was wasting his time, by this point.” she shrugged and rolled her eyes jokingly. “Anyway, uh, long story short, let’s say he forgot to tell me how ‘Undertale’ was actually spelled.”

Dawn looked like she was about to fall off her chair while her eyes would just pop out and fly into the ceiling like a pair of helium balloons.

“That’s how I was convinced.” Alphys chuckled awkwardly. “I mean, I think we both know that he couldn’t have made this stuff up if he wanted to.”

This was a nightmare.

The poor guys. The poor, poor tortured souls, victims of the internet and the naivety and innocence of sweet blissful monsters who did nothing wrong and came all the way from their cocoon of virtual reality without knowing anything of humanity’s darkest side. Tainted forever by the merciless desires of a lusting fandom.

“You should have seen him.” Alphys’s hilarity was becoming harder and harder to repress as she was reminiscing. “He looked ready to blast the entire thing. Pretty sure the only reason he didn’t was because he needed it to save the universe or whatever. So instead he just grabbed the power cable and pulled it out. I kinda wanted to see the safer part of what you guys could’ve been working on, but Sans forced me to leave and asked me to never touch his machine again.”

There were no words. Dawn felt so sorry and all at the same time so powerless.

“He looks tough and all, but he can get flustered way too easily.” she shrugged again. “Anyway… I’ve been having this little suspicion for a while, and what you said about him only brought even more… consistence to this headcanon.”

“What… exactly do you mean by that?”

“Hmm. How would you feel if I told you that even if he’ll never admit it out loud and just pretend he’s fine like always, he’s way too shy to look up any of the fandom stuff?”

“I’d… be relieved? Honestly, I totally understand him on that part. That must’ve been horrible.” Dawn winced overdramatically. “I’m actually happy that he won’t try to look for even more of that stuff. I don’t know what he’s seen but he’s definitely seen enough to scar him… I REALLY don’t know how he’d react, knowing what the fandom has done with him.”

At first, upon listening to her small rant, Alphys gave her a sheepish look, probably feeling somewhat bad about her friend. But when the last words fell into silence, the lizard paused— and, very gradually, an evil Grinch-like grin crept its way up on her muzzle as she slowly turned her head towards the human, sending her a demonic look and playing with her nonexistent yet somehow still very obviously visible eyebrows in that insufferably smug and sly attitude of “Ooh no. You can’t say that and then stop there. Now you HAVE to tell me everything. I DEMAND the details. ALL the details.”

Dawn saw her entire life flashing through her eyes. She was definitely going to be judged for her sins sooner or later.

“… O-ooookay uhhh, where could I even begin. There’s just so much.”

“Just start with the juiciest part.” Alphys whispered sneakily, letting her elbows rest on the table and crossing her clawed fingers so she could rest her head on the stable structure and stare at her with a demonic grin.

The teenager hesitated for at least half a minute.

But in the end… Who the hell cared?

They had already seen the worst part of the fandom, so it wasn’t like she could really make anything worse. Besides, Alphys was the one asking, not her. So why the hell should that fourth wall still stay in place after Sans had worked so hard to obliterate it already.

She sighed, but ended up with a small evil smile in the corner of her mouth and she calmly took her chair in order to bring it next to her, so they could sit side by side. And then, she pulled out of her jeans’ pocket her Special Attack.

… She was so going to burn in hell for this. But this was totally going to be worth it.

“Well, I may or may not have a bunch of fanarts and videos downloaded on my phone.” she said in a fake careless tone, mockingly pretending that it was not that much of a big deal.

When the lizard widened her eyes in sudden interest, she did not hesitate to let her check out her phone for a few seconds; but Alphys immediately returned it to her and asked her to just move on with what they really wanted to do with it. So she turned it on without further ado, and…

“Ah, bummer. It’s almost out of batteries, and I’m sure you guys won’t have a charger around for this thing.”

“Shh.” Alphys shook her head soothingly yet overdramatically and jokingly, her smile still widely visible on her muzzle. “Who needs chargers when you have… electricity magic!”

Jumping out of her seat to stand and take an anime-esque pose, she pointed dramatically at her phone screen and immediately a few bolts zapped around in the air, which gradually raised the battery percentage in the right corner of the screen, and incidentally made Dawn’s hair stand straight on her head and start floating in the air.

Too shocked by being literally surrounded by electric waves, too fearful to move and accidentally get zapped by touching anything, and yet too happily surprised to see Alphys make anime real and have some genuine fun looking voluntarily stupid doing so, the human could do nothing but gape in disbelief with a wide open grin.

Alphys calmly and proudly sat back down on her chair and resumed her former position with her head resting on her delicate and sly crossed arms.

“Now. Please continue.” she purred smugly.

… They really were doing this. Oh boy.

“Hmm… Do you know what an ‘AU’ is? As in, ‘Alternate Universe’?”

“Oh! You mean things around the quantum multiverse theory, trees of possibilities and—”

“No-no-no.” She shook her head with a giant grin slashing her face from ear to ear. “Not in the real physics meaning of the word. In the FANDOM meaning of the word. Did you get to see stuff like that with your own anime fandoms?”

“You mean w-what the fans do when they think it’d be fun to change a few things in the canon universe, for example by switching the roles of some characters?”

“Exactly.” the human nodded exaggeratingly widely and slowly. “Let me introduce you to the wonders of the Undertale fandom. Just a little warning— You will NEVER see Sans the same way after that. Ooh, how about we start with Underswap? How would you imagine a character that looks like Sans, but with PAPYRUS’s personality?”

Alphys pondered the deepest implications of the possibility for an entire minute, as she remained perfectly still and blankly staring at the human without even blinking.

Then, she straightened her back and her head rose before she clicked her tongue loudly.

“Okay, now I NEED to see this.”

When Dawn was done eating her dinner and the two girls had been willing to find a more comfortable place to spend the rest of their evening, they had made their way to the basement and sat on the green couch that Sans had left there. Alphys had said that the basement was soundproof, which could only come to their advantage if they wanted to keep the fanart and their howls of hysteric laughter as much a secret as it could possibly be.

After a few hours of chatting around and listening to or watching what the phone had in store for them, the weight of the events eventually had the better of them. When Sans went down for a two-in-the-morning snack and came to check how they were doing, he found the two girls sound asleep on the sofa, Dawn’s phone threatening to fall out of her half-open hand.

It was early morning.

Dawn and Alphys were still snoozing serenely.

Then, quietly at first but gradually increasing in tone and volume, a voice sneakily rose from the surrounding silence.

… beautiful day outside...

Birds are singing... Flowers are blooming...

Dawn mumbled some grumpy curses under her breath as she attempted to wake up in confusion. Her groggy definitely-not-morning-person mind made her feel like she had heard this before, but her neuronal connections were still too slow to properly process what was happening.

Was it morning already…? Shouldn’t her phone’s alarm be going off then? Naaah, if her phone hadn’t gone off yet then it had to be way too soon for this. She still had time.

... should be burning in hell.

She opened her eyes in shock as the horrifying realization suddenly clicked. In a pitiful attempt to jerk up while not being completely awake, she fell over the sofa and accidentally had Alphys accompany her in response to gravity’s invitation to meet the hard floor in the process.

Turn around kid, it’d be a crime,

Alphys forcefully detached her head away from the floor in alarm as she jerked up awake and shrieked some panicked nonsensical words along the lines of “wu-wu-wu-whaaa?”

First surprise: for some reason, the two girls and the couch were now back in the living room.

If I had to go back on the promise that I made for you,

So don’t step over that line,

Dawn, becoming whiter and whiter by the second, stood up as fast as she could, letting Alphys stumble on the floor again. She nervously turned her head to apologize, but did not make any attempt to help her up and instead dashed away from the sofa as fast as possible.

Second surprise: her cell phone was gone.

Or else friend, you’re gonna have a bad time.

Dawn kept running all around the living room in panic and rising anger, she tried to rifle through drawers and cupboards first in the living room and then in the kitchen before she considered searching upstairs, but for some reason she was simply unable to find where that damned voice was coming from.

Third surprise: given the volume of that damned music, she was pretty sure that her phone’s speakers were not supposed to have enough power to play any song that loud without any help from peripheral devices.

So let’s go, let the room get chiller

Let’s go, dirty brother killer

Every time she felt like she had found its origin, as soon as she had made her way there it appeared that it was now somehow coming from the other end of the room. It was as if the origin of the voice could teleport at will just to mess with her.

Go ahead and try to hit me if you’re able,

“SANS!” Dawn ultimately scowled in pure rage, her face red as a tomato. “WHERE THE FUCK DID YOU PUT MY PHONE!?”

I can tell you’re getting really sick of trying,

Dawn could barely hear underneath the song that a certain someone was doing his best not to laugh too loudly, but she quickly found the origin of that last voice and vociferously stomped her way to him, snatching her phone away from his hands and turning the song off in an instant.

… Sweet, sweet silence. None of the sighs she had previously experienced in her entire life had ever been as relieving as the one she just released.

“Sans. You’d better have a very good reason for waking us up at whatever-in-the-morning it is and give Alphys a heart attack.”

Sans seemed about to lift a finger in order to say something, but the expression on his skull made it clear what he had in mind, so she just interrupted him before he could actually say it.

“I’ll have you know that trolling innocent people who are just trying to sleep peacefully is not a reason good enough.”

“what do you mean?” he immediately retorted in a pseudo innocent tone and with a trollesquely solemn and betrayed look. “i just wanted to make sure you’d be up and dandy right away, since you wanted to help me today and everything. you were the one who told me you wanted to get up early.”

Dawn hardly listened to him, since as soon as she had got her hands back on her phone, she had simply started skimming through its contents in order to try to assess the damage, because she just knew that he wouldn’t have stopped at just one joke.

A grumble escaped her gritting teeth when she noticed immediately that he had changed her wallpaper for nothing else but a bad MS Paint meme. Apparently he had seen the series of cringe-inducing posts parodying his “bad time” speech and eventually opted for the one where admittedly, he didn’t actually look too bad, and the text merely said “Youre on the verje of experiancin a very unfortunet outcom my deerest frend.”

This looked terrible. But somehow, deep down in her SOUL, she just knew that this was far from the damage Sans could have done to her only remaining property.

… Oh. There it was. She hesitated between sighing and face-palming. After a split second of hesitation, she did both.

“… You set exactly forty-eight alarms on my phone so it’d play an intentionally bad fandub of the line “You’d be dead where you stand” followed by the extended version of Megalo Strike Back’s Chara remix for every single hour of every single day in the week. I don’t even know why I’m surprised.” The only reason she took a pause was because she needed to breathe. “And you changed my ringtone for… Wait, I don’t recognize this file.”

She perfectly knew that if she played that sound file she would regret it, but sadly for her and for everyone else in the room, her curiosity had the better of her.

After a split second of static, an obvious sign that it was badly recorded and that the audio had a poor quality which could only mean that listening to this would not be the most pleasant experience, she actually heard Sans’s voice.

As in, the real Sans’s voice.

hey there buddy chum pal friend buddy pal chum bud friend fella bruther amigo pal buddy friend chummy chum chum pal i don’t mean to be rude my friend pal home slice bread slice dawg but i gotta warn ya if u take one more diddly darn step right there im going to have to diddly darn snap ur neck and wowza wouldn't that be a crummy juncture—

Dawn paused the recording and raised a deadpan look.

Sans’s grin was wider than ever. You could literally breathe the smug in his glowing pellets.

“I can’t believe you actually dubbed that one yourself oh my God.”

“hey, if it can console you, i also changed mine.”

And he shrugged. And he raised a different ancient-looking cell phone from his pocket and pressed a button.

A do-ah deh, a-do-do, a-do-ah

A do-ah deeh, a-do-do, a-do-ah…

… Of all the freaking memes he could have found and used as his personal ringtone just for the fun of pissing her off, Mogolovonio started playing.

Dawn looked like she could see her entire life flashing through her eyes. Sans finally found the mercy to spare her the rest of the recording as he paused it. But his smug grin only widened.

This was a nightmare.

No. He did NOT do that right now, no no no you have GOT to be kidding me…

So not only had Sans had the opportunity to mess with her phone, he had apparently managed to retrieve its data and transfer it to his own belongings, meaning that even if she had now her phone with her and under her now would-be constant supervision, she could not be saved.

“… Did you search through all my files?”

All traces of anger had disappeared on her blanched face. Only a primal fear could be heard through her words, now.

“naaah. don’t worry about it, i didn’t poke around too much. i only checked out one folder.” His grin expanded again. “the one you named “shitpost.” it was filled with lots of great content, though.”

The human froze in place, probably trying to contain her storm of emotions as best she could because she definitely didn’t want an unfortunate murder to occur in such a place.

But it was too late.

Nobody would be able to stop this madness now.

In the end, she focused all her energy into one sigh, trying to release it as best she could. She just had to stay patient and focus her energy on what needed to be saved, instead of what needed to be killed with fire.

“… Alphys. What was that one thing you said about Sans being too scared to look at the fandom stuff?”

Alphys was face-palming.

“I meant fanarts. I never said anything about memes.”

Dawn had called it. She knew they would have had to burn in hell for their sins, sooner or later.

She had just dared to wish that it wouldn’t be that soon and savage.

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“Sans.” Dawn grumbled, gritting her teeth. “I got the message. So now, could you please stop singing?”

The last notes of Megalovania turned to a dejected silence, if only for the few seconds the skeleton needed to turn towards her, shrug with a smug smile, and retort:

“what message? there’s no message. s’not my fault if it’s catchy, blame the guy who made the music.”

And the singing resumed, soon accompanied with a concert of sighs coming from both girls in the room.

“Sans, for the love of the Angel, please stop.” Alphys pleaded while rubbing her tired face. “I haven’t had my coffee yet. It’s way too early for memes.”

“_{pft. weaklings.}” He snorted mockingly, walking casually towards the coffeemaker and flipping a switch. “here ya go. will be ready in a minute.”

He quietly made his way back to the kitchen table and took a seat beside the human teenager, watching her with amusement as she was staring angrily at her phone and tediously undoing all the damage he had caused. The monster smirked internally when he realized that she had still to notice more than half of the jokes he had in store.

When silence fell in the room (except for the awkward purrs of the coffee machine), Sans started to utter an excuse so he could sing some more, but he was instantly cut short when Alphys asked Dawn to play some music on her phone, to which she instantly agreed. After a few more minutes of arguing, the trio reached the compromise that her phone could play some of its tracks as background music, as long as all Sans-related songs were automatically banned from the list.

Well, more precisely, this agreement was reached by the two girls, who won by default due to the rules of democracy. Disappointment was very evident on Sans’s skull, but all at the same time he probably was internally relieved that he would not have to worry about potential existential crises or of seeing or hearing things that would remind him of…

He needed to see Alphys’s reaction to understand what exactly the song that was currently playing, Fishy Love, was all about. But when he did, his response was immediate.

“oh come on. why does SHE get to watch stuff about her, and not me?”

“Sans, no offense, but contrary to you, I’m not the literal embodiment of meme.” Alphys sighed, shaking her head pseudo-solemnly.

“Not to mention, your meme potential is increased exponentially in my world. So, trust me, this is also for the sake of your own mental health.” Dawn added sheepishly, but with a half-grin distorted by a mixture between pity and mockery.

“you do know i’ve already seen half of it, right?” the skeleton deadpanned.

“Well, then you don’t need to see it again, do you?” Alphys smirked trollesquely.

Dawn and Alphys shared a synchronized snort and laughs, then high-fived.

Well, considering the fact that Alphys only has four fingers, the terminology could be up for debate. But you get the idea.

The white rectangular phone was magically snatched from Dawn’s hands by something that had come and then vanished so quickly, she hardly had time to see anything but a swift white blur, and after the few seconds she needed to get over the shock, she raised her eyes and saw that the skeleton now had it in his hands, despite the fact that he had not moved the slightest from his seat on the other side of the table.

Then again, he quickly frowned angrily while staring at the screen, as he had turned it on only to be greeted by some sort of grid puzzle preventing him from doing anything else.

“… huh. that’s new.” he grumbled dejectedly.

The teenager smugly stood up from her seat and walked towards him, then stopped in front of him and raised an open hand that politely invited him to give her back her electronical property.

“This is what we commonly call a password, Sans. It’s meant to stop nosy people like you from messing with my files again. So, I’m sorry to announce this, but your little snooping around is over.”

The expression Sans returned her was only that of a non-impressed skeleton troll who had just been challenged. His glowing pupils radiated the Smug and seemed to murmur: “you’re underestimating me big time, bud. you’re gonna regret it.” His stuck-on smirk slowly expanded menacingly.

“you’re on.”

“Yeah, right. Good luck.” She rolled her eyes. “Anyway, I still have to clean up a lot of stuff on it, so I’d like it if you could give it back, now.”

He hesitated, but eventually sighed in defeat and gave in, letting her take back her little piece of technology in peace. If he could pout, she was certain that it was the expression he would have shown on his skull.

“whoa hey. i see what you’re doin here.” he uttered in frustration when he immediately saw her looking for a new image to replace her wallpaper. “you’re not gonna put the old one again, are you?”

Alphys snorted. “Aw, what’s wrong with pics of baby bones being cuddled by the King? You shouldn’t be jealous, you were MUCH cuter than that when you were born.”

Sans was about to say something, but the embarrassment was now obvious on his skull, and he was interrupted anyway when Dawn apparently choked on air and then had some sort of mixture between a coughing fit and hysteric laughter.

“Wait, you…” The human pointed shakily the lizard scientist, then the skeleton standing right next to her. “Y-you. Saw him. As a baby?” she asked in disbelief as soon as she could somewhat control her giggles.

“I know it doesn’t show, but I’m twelve years older than him, actually.” the lizard answered proudly while playing with her nonexistent eyebrows. “And have I SEEN him? I BABYSAT these brothers, girl. We’re family.”

The human gasped overdramatically, a huge dorky grin on her face. “No. Way. So you have… babysitting stories or something?”

Alphys’s demonic smirk was slicing her entire muzzle. “You have NO idea.”

“Al.  D o n ’ t .”

When she turned her head back towards Sans, finally realizing just how silent he had been until that moment, Dawn was not sure what to expect. In any case, there were two very obvious observations she could make instantly:

First of all, somehow, it was indeed possible for skeletons to blush. Papyrus had proven it in the game, but still, there was a huge difference between seeing it on a pixelated sprite, and seeing it on a realistic monster made of bones.

And second, the fans’ headcanon that Sans would blush cyan or blue was wrong. It was the regular color for a blush, and the exact same color as any monster blushing in the game, that was to say, the most saturated red you could imagine. Also, the blush was not just a color on his bones, it was actually faintly glowing. His skull almost looked like one of those lightbulbs in a Christmas decoration right now. If not as adorable as it would have looked in a fanart, it was at the very least hilarious to watch live on the real guy.

“Whatever you say, Rudolf.” Dawn smirked playfully, trying her best not to give in to laughter but quickly enough failing miserably.

She realized after a split second that it was very likely that neither Alphys nor Sans would catch on the reference, but it was too late, and when her brain made the mistake of associating the concepts ‘blushing Sans’ and ‘Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’, the mental image of a glowing Sans in a reindeer costume was enough to make her howl in laughter and bury her head in her hands as embarrassed tears began to appear in the corner of her eyes.

Too late. The image is here now, and it will never go away.

The two monsters watched her in surprise and confusion, but she could not see them and she certainly was not currently in the physical capability of explaining anyone anything. When the coffee was ready and the human finally managed to calm down, her messy hair and reddened face made her look at least just as ridiculous as the initial subject of her hilarity.

“Seriously though, I really need to find a better wallpaper. Hmm.”

She wiped the wetness off her eyes and tried to arrange her hair a bit, but sadly, it appeared that sleeping in a sofa along with an electricity-based lizard monster was not a good idea if you wanted to be photogenic on the next day.

“Well, that’s about as good as it’s ever gonna be.” she mumbled in defeat, pouting. She sent a sheepish grin at Alphys, and raised her phone: “Selfie?”

The scientist snorted and shook her head jokingly, but she accepted and stood up to join her, posing with a small smile and the classic V sign. Dawn just went for the widest, dorkiest grin she could make. Sans turned around with the coffee pot in his hand just in time for the camera to catch his confused expression in the frame.

When the two girls looked at the result, they unanimously agreed that it looked terrible. Sans asked them to delete it. These were the two reasons why they spent the next ten minutes sitting one next to the other and discussing which filters to apply so they could make Dawn’s soon-to-be lock screen wallpaper look even worse. Sans soon gave up and seemed resigned that he now had to accept the cruelty of the world. Until he figured out her password, that was.

“Anyway… What’s the plan?” Dawn eventually asked.

“for now, breakfast.” Sans shrugged distractedly. Apparently, it was not time yet to talk about serious stuff, huh. He opened the microwave and pulled out a fuming plate before offering it to her. “bacon?”

The human stared at the plate for three solid seconds, blinking in surprise. She took some of it, but her shocked expression remained until he jokingly asked her what was wrong with it.

“Nah, I’m not gonna ask how the heck you can make magic food bacon.” She pouted in confusion and shook her head… But soon she gave in. “… Okay quick question: do you have magic pigs? Shouldn’t magic pigs turn to dust when they die? How does that even work? Are we eating monster dust?”

Both monsters stared at her blankly for about a dozen seconds. Then Sans burst out laughing loudly and tried to make incoherent babbling mockeries until he looked like he had trouble breathing. Dawn’s expression turned into a deeply offended and flustered one.

“What? It’s a legitimate question!”

“Well, it’s not actual meat.” Alphys simply answered. “Originally, our food came from some species of magic plants and beings… But we only have vegan food now, since very few of these creatures were trapped underground with us, so we’ve only been able to grow magic crops. So… all other types of food are actually inspired from human meals and manufactured.”

“You mean they’re GMO?” She raised an eyebrow.

“… I have no idea what that means.” Alphys admitted after a few more seconds of blank stares.

Dawn returned her surprised look, but then she started wondering if monsters had DNA at all, or even, maybe, just about any kind of biological system that had anything in common with the biology she was familiar with (which she admittedly did not know much about to begin with).

In any case, if their bodies’ biology did not rely on that sort of genetic language or whatever, there was no question as to whether or not they knew how to alter it, or why they would bother doing it in the first place.

Alphys eventually sighed as she took some slices herself and filled her plate. “Look, it’s just as safe as any other types of food. It just looks and takes like bacon.”

Maybe she had read the teenager’s expression as if she had been wary of the food she had been given. Oh well. It wasn’t like she’d ever fear that any of these guys would poison her food or anything. She was just curious.

Because heck. Food that’s literally made out of magic.

How awesome is that.

… That did not taste like bacon.

She stared in disbelief at what was standing at the end of her fork. That looked like bacon, true.

It didn’t taste bad, it might have some kind of taste that may have felt like some sort of meat, but that was not bacon. But it sure as heck looked like it. Weiiiiiiird.

Well, as she reasoned, the monsters had been trapped underground for whatever how long that made, maybe centuries or something, and in the meantime they only had the Garbage dump and human movies and anime as a reference for what was going on outside. They had the images and sounds, but nothing else. So… She couldn’t exactly blame them for getting some tastes wrong, since they literally had no outside reference.

Still. She really couldn’t have even five minutes without getting something weird, could she…? It was a lot of fun, but she kinda would have liked having a break every now and then. She was enjoying all the new stuff, she was curious, she wanted to respect the change in culture and be a good guest and all that, but… Welp. Breakfast, please. She was just asking for five minutes of tranquility and normality. Was that too much to ask?

She decided that she could just as well start a conversation that would be actually useful. Maybe that would distract her from the not-so-mundane mundanities from this world.

“So… I was just wondering. How many people know about the situation, exactly? I probably should’ve asked earlier, but…”

“just us three.” Sans replied immediately.

“Everyone knows Sans is working here.” Alphys completed. “They know that the plan is basically to g-go back in time before the last human arrived, and stop their rampage. But we didn’t tell anyone else about the video game, or the time loops…”

“and we didn’t tell anyone about you.” he added sharply, his stuck-on smirk looking for the first time strained and nervous. “so, uh, i didn’t think it was necessary to tell ya this before, but yeah, you’re in hiding right now. it’s likely that if anyone sees there’s a human here, they’ll wanna kill you on sight, and i’m not sure i could convince that many people not to. some would probably be cool with it, but we just don’t know that for sure, y’know? so… just don’t do anythin stupid while you’re here.”

“Yeah…” She nodded tensely, looking down gloomily and guiltily. “I wasn’t planning to anyway, but… yeah.”

He quickly reassured her that it shouldn’t be too hard for her to stay unnoticed given the fact that everyone else was currently living on the other side of the cavern; but still, the thought that she was basically an outlaw was… saddening. She wished the other monsters didn’t have to live in suffering and fear until they were done with Sans’s time machine and launched the Last Reset, but…

Well, some things just could not be solved so easily. Maybe she had to accept the reality that she was, after all, just a teen who had been invited in a world that wasn’t hers and that despite everything, there were limitations to what she had control upon. Maybe she had to find a cure to the protagonist syndrome that was trying to make its way up in her head. She was special in this world due to being a Special Human or whatever, but Sans had a plan, and the plan did not require her to do anything particularly heroic; on the contrary, acting like Frisk and being all Determined to Save Everyone or whatever was probably one of the most efficient ways to completely jeopardize his plan.

So her role was simple: she had to stay put, and maybe help however she could with what was happening inside the house. Not outside of it.

She hoped she could be at least somewhat useful once in the basement. That was the least she could do.

“so here we were, all sittin ‘round the spectra results and tryin to make some sense outta them. i think by that point he’d asked for help from practically everyone in the lab, and nobody could figure out how he could’ve got these results. y’could hear theories from the technicians and the pros, like how the problem could’ve come from the pump, or someone forgot to calibrate the sensors, or the sample was too old, we even got that lunatic sayin it was evidence of that eighth type of magic he’d been talkin about for a decade or whatever.”

Sans had started telling some sort of college story that Dawn had a hard time following. It was something about a machine malfunctioning during his practical exercises in the middle of his finals, maybe… Well, seeing him so chatty and happy was all she really needed to be reassured about how he felt in general, but she would have preferred being able to at least understand what he was talking about.

“and then you know what? turned out the prof’d just forgott’n to plug the destabilizer in. ‘f course he used that ‘i was seeing if you were listening’ bullshit and put the ones who were laughing on dishwashing duty. anyway, that’s how i got a d in chromatography and realized that magic color theory was boring as hell.”

The atmosphere in Sans’s basement was… interesting, to say the least. They were working and each giving their all, and they were gladly helping each other out whenever some assistance was required.

Unsurprisingly, Dawn was most of the time staying on the sidelines and mostly watching the two monster scientists, waiting patiently for one of them to ask for her help on something that would keep her busy for the next few minutes because it would happen to be a step that would require her to hold something firmly so the other one could focus on a precise task or something of the like — so either way, she was either waiting in a corner, or waiting by holding something still or carrying stuff around in the basement so the two others could focus on their tasks at hand. Still, she was docile and had pretty much expected this outcome, and she was happy to be of help without being too much of a nuisance or taking too much space when her help was not required.

She was bored, but then again, she was good at waiting when she knew for a fact that it was the wisest thing to do.

All in all, everything was going smoothly…

“hey intern, i need the qm recalibratin tangler.”

Alphys rolled her eyes, sighing with little conviction. “She’s not an intern, Sans.”

… So smoothly, it appeared that they felt the need to spice things up themselves by finding various and unnecessary ways to create some playful, ironic bickering.

“is she a professional technician? does she have any experience whatsoever in entanglement physics or does she have any idea what she’s doing?”

The skeleton’s grin was definitely the one of a troll who wanted nothing but to playfully mess with the people around him even if they were his friends, because of no other motive but pure boredom. Seeing the lack of verbal answer from both girls, he shrugged trollesquely.

“so she’s an intern. also, where’s that tangler at?”

Dawn sighed. “I would give it to you, but… The heck is that supposed to be? I don’t even have a clue what it’s supposed to look like.”

Alphys rummaged through her box for a few seconds, then pulled out a small tool that she held in victory. “Oh, here it is.”

The human blinked. “That… looks like a screwdriver. Why don’t you just call it a screwdriver?”

“why don’t you call a toaster an ‘oven’?”

“Duh. ‘Cause it makes toast.”

“then ya got your answer. damn are interns dumb. what do they teach ya kids in schools nowadays.”

Dawn sent him a death glare, muttering with spite: “_{… I’ll just keep calling it a screwdriver.}”

Sans had started it, without surprise, but Alphys and Dawn were quick to find their own ways to chat or verbally prank him in return. As long as this did not affect the quality of their work, the casual banter and jokes were perfectly welcome and actually helped lift everyone’s spirits.

When the human teenager gave Sans this screwdriver odd magic tool, the one thing she had definitely not expected when watching him use it led her to ponder a few more issues regarding her current situation; she did not have that many better things to do, anyway.

The skeleton pretended not to see her watching, or at least not to be bothered by it; as he brought his seat closer to his desk and adjusted a magnifying lens so it could focus on a certain part of the circuitry he was about to work on, he hovered his tool closer and, in a second, small flashes of white emerged then vanished all around his hands.

It took a few dozen seconds of mesmerized inspection before she could finally confirm that those little ghastly, somewhat solid white lights that were flying around at high speed and carving patterns in the metal board as easily as if it were butter, were actually magic bullets.

This observation led to a long list of unspoken questions.

She wondered whether these bullets were created and directed through that whatever-it-was-called tool thing, or if Sans was making them himself.

Seeing how he was making some motions with his tool that did not seem to be in relation with the movements the bullets were following, it appeared that Sans really was the one creating and controlling them all by himself; she tried to give a closer look at those bullets in order to see if they could be just really tiny bones, but they were less than half an inch long and they were moving way too fast for her to see anything more than just a blur of light.

Seeing magic bullets had first frightened her on instinct, and just like during that moment the previous night when Alphys had lost her cool, she wondered how they could appear outside of battle. Then again, she remembered that Undyne could totally summon as many magic spears as she wanted while in the overworld, and effectively use them for things other than mere battle: although that was a very questionable choice, she was able to use one to stir dry pasta in a pan. So, maybe no FIGHT was initiated as long as these bullets were left alone to do what the monster who summoned them wanted them to do…?

She wondered if the entire world would turn monochrome whenever a FIGHT was initiated, the same way it was represented both in the game and in some fanarts and animations, and part of her was tempted to trigger one just to satisfy this curiosity… But, nah, that wasn’t worth the risk and waste of time this would be to do something so stupid. Curiosity was a very strong motivator, but hardly ever a worthy motivation by itself.

Also, she soon remembered that during Undyne’s date, Frisk could hold her spear however they wanted, and no FIGHT was triggered as long as Undyne was the one who initiated the idea; so maybe the intent was also required in order to start the FIGHT, if it weren’t the only trigger instead of the contact with the bullet…?

That was probably up for debate. Maybe she would ask Sans or Alphys later, at a time when they wouldn’t be so focused on their advanced magic-y science stuff.

Another question that immediately went over her mind was: “Aren’t bullets only meant for fighting?”

Could it be that monsters were actually using bullets, or maybe their magic in general, for much more mundane usages than just the occasional FIGHT? Her mind was conflicted between the part that was thinking that, since they had these magic powers, obviously they would want to use them whenever they felt like it due to how useful it could be; and the part that was trying to make some sense out of Undertale’s gameplay and just how it was impacting these monsters’ mundane life.

Not once since she arrived did she notice anything that would undeniably prove to her that she was inside a video game, apart from the fact that duh, she was surrounded by the game’s characters and the landscapes of the game’s Underground, and even though Sans and Alphys looked incredibly realistic, the fact that the game was controlling this world was all she really needed to remember that this world’s rules of physics were different than hers.

She had never seen any floating buttons giving her options she could make, there were no dialogue boxes, and she had never seen any ‘screen mode’ other than the classic overworld one; but maybe Sans and Alphys had just made sure that she would stay away from gameplay elements as much as possible for her own safety… or for theirs, too, maybe. Maybe they weren’t trusting her completely yet, especially if she was supposed to be a ‘Player’ and could have more options than they did, or something like that.

When she had asked him for details in the morning, Sans did tell her (reluctantly) that her SOUL was supposed to be about four times stronger than a regular human’s was. Adding that to the fact that she was most probably older than Frisk and that, during this Run, a kid had been able to cause so much pain and destruction… She had no idea what kind of disaster she could cause herself if she snapped, but she was very glad that she, at least, trusted herself to have enough mental health to stay pacifistic all the way. Because duh. Who would be crazy enough to murder these guys while being fully aware that they were sentient and asked for nothing but freedom and peace?

Seeing that maybe her staring was in fact distracting Sans, she decided to slowly walk away and give him some space so he could keep working quietly; the gesture seemed to indeed let him relax a little bit. Was he anxious about her proximity to the bullets, maybe? Yeah, maybe she should have kept her distance since the start; his work looked like it was all about precision, but maybe controlling these bullets’ trajectories like this was harder when they were so small, and potentially sharp. She probably should have realized sooner just how difficult this specific task was.

As soon as the small buzzing sound of the tiny bullets carving the board stopped, Sans pulled the lens away and he turned around with an expression that immediately revealed what he was about to do:

“welp. this is gettin a bit too quiet.” he affirmed in a resolute, joking sigh. “who’s for puttin on some more background music?”

“I veto all Undertale OST and fan songs.” Alphys retorted immediately, without even looking away from her work.

“Ditto.” the human added, just as quickly.

The two girls heard a muttered curse and they snickered in unison. There was no further opposition to their conditions, so soon Dawn started her playlist of random songs that had nothing to do with the game and that hopefully did not include too much meme material.

“you think you’re so clever, huh.” Sans grumbled humorously. “al, you done with your part of the motherboard?”

“Almost.” she confirmed while nodding.

“great. might be ‘bout time we started putting everythin together then, don’t ya think?”

Dawn realized that it was finally the time when Sans would remove that purplish blanket in the back of the room, which meant that it was finally the time when she would discover just what was beneath it. Just like that, the skeleton’s left hand grabbed one corner and after a swift pull, the whole fabric tumbled to the floor.

The teenager blinked in shock.

“Wait, what the…” Her eyes zigzagged horizontally for a few seconds. “There’s two of them?”

“duh.” He rolled his eyes overdramatically, grinning jokingly at her ignorance. “how else do you think i brought you here? i know my shortcuts are great, but don’t overestimate them. interdimensional travel’s still out of my reach without some help.”

“I… kinda just assumed that you used your time machine, to be honest.” she answered sheepishly.

The look in his eye-sockets seemed to tell that he wanted so badly to start some scientific rant about how stupid it was to think that a time machine could do some space travel or something like this, but he quickly sighed and decided against it, instead muttering something among the lines of “ain’t that easy, bud. that’s not how it works.”

“anyway, looks like we’ve got some time before al’s done with her part. somethin tells me you’d like some more explainin’ in the meantime. don’t you?”

“I, uh…” Dawn was soon reminded of all the theories regarding the potentially depressing implications behind this machine and what exactly it could have meant for him. Should she really go on and make him talk about what was very likely to be some painful memories…? “I w-wouldn’t want to impose, but…”

“you’re curious about it.” He shrugged, closing his sockets and chuckling lazily. “ehh, it’s cool. i mean, i still owe you some answers after draggin’ you all this way, right?” He winked. “’sides, it’s actually nice that you seem interested in this stuff.”

“My best friend loves physics. Probably because of her dad.” she answered with an awkward smile. “So… I don’t understand a lot of it, but it’s hard not to be curious at least a little when she’s so passionate about it all the time. Maybe her passion’s contagious or whatever. _{Also, I think she’s jealous that I’m better at math than she is. Ha.}”

“you’re good at math?” he raised a nonexistent eyebrow in surprise.

“It’s just that it’s her weak point and I’m not too bad.” she pouted, looking away. “Doesn’t mean I like it. Math is dumb and unimaginative.”

The monster snickered. “i disagree with that on a lot of levels, but that’s your opinion i guess.”

He stayed still next to her, as they both kept staring at the two machines standing side by side, now in silence. After a few more seconds, Sans invited her to look at the one on the left with a wide nod from his skull.

“that’s the one that brought you here.” he calmly explained while gesturing it with a lazy hand wave.

The gigantic monstrosity was much bigger than the other, towering them with almost ten-feet-tall, dark thick pipes, and long wires strangling an approximately human-sized cavity surrounded by what was likely to be the generator. She had guessed that inviting people into another (virtual?) reality would require a lot of energy and means… but still.

All she could see there was that he really had put a lot of effort into that project. Besides… She wondered how it could have possibly worked. She was certain that bringing actual matter inside a virtual reality was not supposed to be possible, so… Had he used that machine to somehow recreate a body to store her consciousness or something…? The more she thought about it, the more her parallel with The Matrix seemed to be the explanation that made the most sense to her.

This also raised the question of what happened to her actual body back in her own world. Sans had assured her that she would be able to go back safe and sound as soon as he was done, but… How did that work? Was her real body in a coma or something? If she was meant to stay here for at least a few weeks, shouldn’t that be a problem for her health? Could it be that by now, her parents had sent her comatose body to a hospital or something…?

Yikes, that was a creepy thought. Part of her forcedly reminded herself that Sans had promised that she would be fine. So, she had trouble understanding how he would keep his promise, but she reasoned that she probably just wasn’t examining the situation under the right perspective, which would explain why she had missed some key details.

One of those key details could just as well be the answer to the following question: did time even work the same way in both worlds? In the plot of most of the fanfictions she knew about where the setting would be somewhat similar to her current situation, most of these stories ended with some sort of justification as to why nobody from the player’s world ever got to question or even notice anything: the fact that it had all been some sort of lucid dream overnight, the fact that somehow the entirety of the story had occurred in the span of just a few minutes at best due to some weird, faulty relativity physics…

Dawn used to think of this kind of plot conclusion as a cheap tactic or excuse that would allow the authors writing these stories not to involve anyone from the player’s world, but now…? She actually hoped that this cheap tactic would be what reality had in store for her, because she certainly did not want anyone to worry about her, and because she was not ready to explain anyone what exactly would have happened to her in the meantime. Especially not if the police was to be involved. That would be awkward.

Maybe she would just literally find herself waking up in her bedroom, her slobbering face resting at a painful angle against the keyboard, now with imprints of keys and random letters on her forehead or something, and then realize that practically no time had passed at all since her kidnapping. That would be embarrassing, but that would also be the most convenient solution both regarding the problems of health and trauma from her family, and the one of finding a proper way to tell them what happened.

If hardly any time had passed for them, so much that they wouldn’t even have had the time to realize that she was gone, maybe there wouldn’t be anything to explain at all.

She didn’t have time to mentally gossip much further though, because Sans had already moved on with his explanations and was now entirely focused on the other block of steel and iron. It appeared that the machine was purring, as if it were already working; but soon he went to flip a few switches, and the noise stopped promptly as all the indicator lights turned off.

“as for this one… well, you know it already. that’s what we’re gonna work on today.” His wide smile was shining with hope. “it was fully functional, a long time ago. still kinda is. it got caught in an accident at some point, but we really just need to fix a few old bruises and then find a power source strong enough, and it’s good to go. it’s gonna take some time, but… well. if it weren’t for time jumpin back every now and then, i would’ve totally been able to fix it a while ago. it’s not like it’s gonna be actually hard to do it now.”

She was certain that he was making it sound a lot easier than it would really be, but seeing how they had been working so far, she fully trusted him. She, personally, would certainly not be able to understand a lot of what they were going to do, but as a team, they would succeed. With both Sans and Alphys as the monster geniuses working on it at the same time, she knew that they had nothing to worry about.

Speaking of Alphys, she called out to them and let them know that she was done with her part of… whatever she had been doing. They weren’t really explaining much of what their work was for. Well, she couldn’t really blame them: at first they really had tried to tell her the basics, but the fact that they were working on something that was obviously some advanced science stuff even for monsters, and that their technology seemed to include a lot of magic concepts that she was completely unfamiliar with, they soon gave up trying to explain her anything due to the waste of time it was likely to become. Apparently, since they were living in a world where the laws of physics were different, they literally based their science and theories on different laws of physics, magic, or whatever she was supposed to call it. As if listening to human physicists talking about human science weren’t complicated enough.

While Dawn was pondering whether physics was supposed to be a multiversal science or not, Sans left her side to help the lizard scientist move the weird part of machinery she had been working on closer to the big time machine she was examining. She soon pulled herself out of her trance when she noticed their struggle and dashed to their rescue.

One thing she had been shocked to learn was the fact that monsters were incredibly weak physically — at least, Sans and Alphys were. They could work through life without much trouble, but apparently moving heavy stuff around was taking a lot more out of them than she would have expected: even if she considered herself to be far from physically built, she appeared to be a lot stronger than either of them, arguably both of them together, even.

She attributed this to the fact that monsters’ bodies were physically much weaker than humans’ according to the game’s lore; but still, seeing this for herself was concerning. Could they actually injure themselves to a serious degree if they were to carry around something that was too heavy for them? Could such effort… dust them?

One thing was clear, she did not want to find out.

As soon as the part of machinery was carefully laid on the ground, the monsters thanked her like the previous times, and like the previous times she brushed it off, too worried about what could have happened to them if she hadn’t come to help. She theorized that in other facilities where they were constantly building stuff, they probably had some equipment to help them properly, and that it just so happened that Sans did not have that sort of equipment in his basement due to a number of guessable reasons.

The two monsters immediately went to open some panels and connect random colored wires between the original time machine and whatever Alphys had been working on. Sans soon brought the parts he had crafted earlier, and they connected one of them elsewhere on the same machine, probably as a replacement of sorts because he previously removed from the machine a board that looked similar to it, except that it was in pretty bad shape.

Eventually, he went to a certain part of the machine, opened another panel, and motioned her to come to his side. When she arrived and looked, she saw that inside the cavity in the machine stood a rather large, transparent can containing some strange liquid-looking… thing.

“that’s the dt battery system.” he said, answering her implied question.

“DT… As in ‘determination’?”

“yep. as far as we know, that’s the only thing that can let things or people remain unchanged through time jumps – i mean resets” (he seemed to have corrected himself reluctantly) “or even cause them.”

That machine was running on determination…? The more you know. Then again, time machine, in the Undertale universe. Of course determination was the most obvious choice for the engine’s fuel or whatever.

Now that she was thinking about it, she realized that there really were only two functional machines in the room, one responsible for her presence here, and the other supposed to control time or whatever. But… What about Sans’s memory? She remembered that he had mentioned that he had… “manually saved his memory”, or something like that. Which to her meant that he had probably used some sort of machine for that too, and seeing that Sans had actually shut down the time machine just a few minutes earlier… Could it be that this was what he was already using to save his memory as well? She theorized that in order for his machine to be able to save his memory throughout time, said machine needed to be present during each time loop as well. So, seeing that according to the game this was the only machine supposed to be here from the start… Maybe it wasn’t too far-fetched.

For once… She wanted to make sure. She still had a lot of questions, after all, and maybe thinking everything through all by herself was a bit stupid, when she could just ask the guy that was standing right next to her and had all the answers she wanted.

“I just thought…” she started awkwardly, then bit her lip. “It’s just… Is this what you’re using to remember the timelines?”

The wide eye-sockets and bright glowing dots locked on her showed that, first of all, her deduction was most probably correct, and that, second, he definitely had not expected her to be able to make that deduction.

“well… yeah. good job on guessin’ that.” He sighed. “you prolly know what happens if you mix monsters and determination—” (she flinched) “— yeah you see what i’m talkin’ about. so if the machine’s the one holding on to it… it can save anything for me.”

He looked uncomfortable. A dark part of her mind realized that since the machine was now turned off, and since it was supposed to save his memory, it was one of the rare moments when Sans’s mind was vulnerable to potential Resets. She was the one able to Reset if she wanted to, and she had just found out his greatest weakness.

She gulped. Now more than ever, it was definitely not the time to screw up.

“I wasn’t supposed to know that, was I…” she winced, sending him an apologetic look, then sighed tensely. “I-it’s okay, I understand why you wouldn’t want me to find out. I’m sorry I…”

He chuckled awkwardly, shaking his skull. “n-nah, i… really just forgot to tell ya. i mean, never intended to hide that or anythin, i would’ve told you if you asked, but there’s just…”

She clenched her teeth and fists in a mixture of feelings that she had trouble identifying. Was her patience faltering? She was not sure. The only thing she was sure about was: that was enough.

“Sans. Look.” He turned his anxious gaze towards her, and she returned him a pair of upset, yet determined eyes. “I know I’m… well. I’m really curious, about a lot of stuff. I have a lot of questions. But… It’s okay if you want to have your secrets. I still don’t know everything about you, and even if there are theories and stuff back in my world, and even if I really want to ask you about it, it’s just… It’s not fair, you know? I just… know too much already.” She bit her lip again and looked to the side. “So… I’ll always be here if you want to talk about some stuff or whatever, because maybe I know enough so I can understand how you feel or whatever, but… I only want you to talk about it if you want to. Okay?”

There was a long pause. Those two white glowing pupils kept staring at her and slightly trembled, but soon they went to look back at the machine and his frozen smile expanded a bit, as it finally became a lot more relaxed and genuinely relieved.

“… thanks, kid. really means a lot comin’ from you.”

She tried to give him an honest, encouraging smile in return, although a little part of it was strained. Maybe she felt already that leaving him alone with his past would be harder than she made it sound, and she hated it. Being mature could be so hard and frustrating sometimes, but… This was the right thing to do, wasn’t it?

Even if it hurt, maybe she had to try to weight out which amount of pain would hurt more: her pain of knowing he was hiding things from her and that he didn’t trust her, or his pain of feeling intruded on, on what was likely to be already painful parts of his life? Even though she could not assess properly the second option due to not knowing the details of what it was all about, it still was easy to compare the two possibilities.

“So, um, I don’t want to ruin a moment, but is the container coming already…?”

Sans and Dawn were pulled out of their thoughts when Alphys awkwardly called out to them, reminding them of what they were supposed to do before they started chatting around.

“oh, right.” the skeleton chuckled. He pulled a small tool out of nowhere and quickly moved it around the glass can, untangling the few wires connected to it and removing the screws keeping it in place. “we need to bring it over. thing is, it’s a bit heavy, so…”

“No worries, I got it.” She grinned, then seized the container with both hands and swiftly, but carefully raised it from its original location. She winced a bit. “Oof— okay, it is a bit heavier than I thought, but I’m fine. Where do you guys want me to put it?”

“Just here is fine, don’t worry.” the lizard scientist smiled, pointing the floor against a corner of the machine and by her side.

After smiling and nodding in understanding, the human secured the translucent can in her hands and squeezed it tightly against her chest… But that was when it happened.

Whatever happened, it happened fast. Dawn hardly had the time to turn around and start walking towards the designated destination, when a flash of light occurred. The human teenager cried in shock and pain, there was the sound of a heavy object falling, and before anyone could barely process that something had happened, let alone comprehend what had happened, the two dumbstruck monsters were facing a whimpering human lying on the floor and clutching her chest in pain, and a glass container rolling on the floor with a fracture that let its contents slowly ooze out and leave a growing trail of shifting drops.

Okay, now that’s new. What just happened?!

“shit!” Sans was the first to react, and judging by his vocabulary, he was probably not in the state of mind to think. “no-no-no-no-no…”

Surprisingly enough, instead of focusing on the container, he rushed towards the human and let Alphys take care of the leaking determination instead, as he carefully kept his distance with it and even backed away on instinct when he feared he might have accidentally stepped on some of it.

Dawn looked groggy and in pain, at best. He struggled to help her sit up and face him, but it did not seem to help at all as the cracks in her grimace only deepened in response. He carefully helped her lie back down and apologized.

She had trouble thinking. She had no idea what had happened, but she was certain she had let go off what she was supposed to hold on, and she heard panicked voices around her, and she remembered that what she was holding was some liquid determination or whatever, and she probably had messed up pretty badly by letting go off it, and she did not know what happened but there was something and it hurt…

Yet, somehow, suddenly, that something in her chest felt something that wasn’t pain. It was not enough to soothe her and make her forget about the pain, but it helped a lot by making it at least a lot more bearable, and gradually she was able to regain at least some kind of control over her breathing and movements. Her eyes felt a bit wet. Had she been crying from the pain? When finally she opened her eyes if ever so slightly, the wetness made her vision blurry, but the first thing she saw was a skull looming over her. It was Sans, wasn’t it? But why did she feel like his pupils weren’t supposed to look so bright and colored…?

When Sans saw her eyes open, he did not wait any longer.

“dawn, can you hear me?” he hurriedly called out. There were suddenly three small flashes of white that flickered in panic just behind his shoulders. “how many bones do you see?”

Oh… So he had summoned a few bone bullets, huh. Some part of her wanted to feel threatened by the view of giant floating bones roaming right above her, but maybe she was too dazed to feel it. Maybe her brain was not able to trigger the right chemicals to raise any red flags, whether she logically should feel threatened or not.

Either way, she tried to strengthen her grip on reality as best she could, by focusing on the simple task that had been given to her. But… was it really that simple?

“Uuuuh…” She looked confused and unsure, thinking hard. “S-should I count you in it? I-i’m not sure h-how many b-bones there are in your body…”

Sans stared at her for a few seconds with a deadpan look. The bone-bullets vanished into thin air, then he released his grip on her arms and plunged his hands in his hoodie’s pockets, turning around towards Alphys.

“… well, she’s fine.” he grumbled, rolling his pupils.

Alphys was crouching over the drops of determination on the floor with the open container by her side, and she seemed to be using some form of magic in order to tentatively guide the liquid back into the container without touching it directly. Needless to say, it was a slow and rather ineffective process. Dawn wondered if Sans’s blue magic could have been more useful there, assuming that it worked the way she imagined it. Which… was probably false, because the game never really made it look that much like any sort of actual telekinesis. Or did it…? Ugh, she probably wasn’t in the capability of thinking about this sort of thing right now.

“Sans, this isn’t funny.” the lizard scolded. “Either you stay with her, or come and help me clean this up.”

“i know, geez.” He sighed, then bent back over the human’s head and his gaze was more intense and focused. “seriously, how’re you feeling?”

Dawn scrunched up her face in odd, confused expressions, as if she was not sure herself. Still, she soon muttered an unsure “… Better?” as an attempt to reassure him. She frowned and tried to move around, so Sans carefully helped her sit up once more. This time, it appeared that it was not as painful as the previous attempt.

However, as she was sitting up and looked down so she could find support on the ground, her eyes met a diffused, wide cyan light radiating from her chest.

She looked up. Sans’s pupils glowed the same color.

She looked down again. She brought both hands over the light as if to try to shield it from view and her face blushed.

Was that her SOUL?

“it looks okay enough… i think.” he muttered tensely, apparently still worried. His glowing pupils moved to look at her in the eye, although they kept their current aspect. Eye contact with a pair of cyan rings was weird. “still. you got any idea what happened?”

She shook her head nervously. It felt light. “No, I have no idea…” She blinked and stared again at her chest, then gulped uncomfortably. “Can you, not, do that?”

The monster stared in confusion, then followed her eyes to look at the big cyan heart-shaped shadow she was ineffectively trying to hide with her hands. He blinked in realization, but did not seem that fazed by it.

“… oh. right.” He blinked again, and when his bony eyelids opened, his pupils were back to their original white color and regular shape. He grinned jokingly. “what, never seen your soul before?”

She merely shook her head tensely, pursing her lips. “It’s… big.” she grimaced.

“well, it’s bigger than the ones you’re supposed to see around here, that’s for sure.” he nodded and shrugged casually, still smiling. “four times stronger than the norm, remember?”

Alphys came over, as she was apparently done cleaning up what could be fixed of the incident and went to crouch down next to Sans. She whispered to him that she would take it from here, and the human teenager felt reassured to see what she assumed to be the closest thing to a doctor among monsters. She was not sure whether anything severe really had happened, but the event had been shocking enough as it was, and now she needed answers.

“So… Something happened to my s-soul?” she asked immediately and fearfully.

Being hurt physically was one thing— especially if the body she had right now was not her real one, but rather a virtual recreation of it or whatever it was like in the movies. But… Now, receiving damage to her SOUL? She was not sure what the consequences really were. Maybe she would just be healed and her HP would go back to its maximum or something as easy as that. Or maybe it was actually serious. Sans and Alphys had looked panicked as if it were serious.

Hardly listening to her question, the lizard scientist merely answered “I’ll be the judge of that.”, as she had already grabbed her shoulders and made her stand straight, staring directly at her chest without wasting time. When that weird feeling from a few minutes earlier came back to wrap itself around her chest and Dawn saw weird lights flickering around Alphys’s head, she understood that she was using her magic to stare at her SOUL again.

… Damn that was awkward. Was this something common among monsters? Did they just look at each other’s SOULs just like that whenever they felt like it? Maybe it would have been more polite if they asked, at least, wouldn’t it?

Judging by the look on Alphys’s face as soon as she caught a glimpse of her SOUL, apparently she had never seen anything like it. She had studied Asgore’s six SOULs before, so maybe it had to do with the fact that hers was stronger and bigger, maybe…? She hoped that it was because of her surprise of seeing for the first time an aberration of nature, rather than because of something severe that should not have happened to abovementioned aberration of nature.

After what felt like forever, the monster sighed and closed her eyes in what seemed to be relief. The human felt the grip on her SOUL loosen, then gradually vanish.

“Well… It looks fine for now, at least.” the scientist mumbled. “I would’ve preferred taking a full examination to be sure, but I’d need you to be at the lab for that, so I suppose that’s not an option. I guess we’ll just have to keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t worsen.”

Dawn gulped and sent the two monsters a distressed look. “So… You guys don’t know what happened?”

“Not at all.” Alphys shook her head shamefully.

“not a clue.” Sans added gravely. “it never happened before, even when human souls were around. so i don’t know what your soul did, but that’s new.”

When she saw the looks on the monsters’ faces, Dawn looked down shamefacedly. They seemed to be more worried about her than about the incident she had caused, and that was very sweet of them, but… What about the incident? Maybe someone at least had to worry about that part, too.

“D-did something happen to the container? Did we lose something important?” she asked guiltily.

Alphys snorted weakly, brushing off her question as if it were stupid. “It’s fine, don’t worry about that. Equipment breaks all the time in the lab, that just happens.”

The skeleton shook his skull heavily. “we didn’t lose much and the container’s easy to replace.” he assured. His sockets opened and the glowing pellets stared back at her. “you, on the other hand… quite a bit harder to replace your soul.”

There was a tense silence. Maybe, after all, she was also considered to be part of the equipment, and a very rare part at that. She was soon reminded that she was not just a possible friend to them, but first and foremost their last hope. Whether they cared about her or not, they probably could not afford to lose her, because something terrible would happen if they did. The human gulped, not daring to look away from the determination can. After half a minute, Alphys was the first one to regain her speech as she sent her a worried look and scrunched up expression.

“Listen, Dawn, m-maybe it’s best if you…”

“Yeah.” She sighed deeply, then nodded blankly but frantically, her face still pale. “I’ll just… go upstairs.”

Sans nodded sharply. “good idea yeah.”

“I’ll… make us some brunch?” she said tentatively, forcedly tearing upwards the corners of her mouth. “How’s that sound?”

“Brunch sounds nice.” Alphys smiled sheepishly.

Dawn sent them one last look before leaving the basement, silently wishing that they could manage the rest even if she weren’t there to help. She hoped they wouldn’t have too many heavy objects to move around.

Noon was near when Sans walked upstairs to see how the human was doing; she had been left alone for hardly twenty minutes, but still, after she left the atmosphere in the basement was simply… different. He didn’t know whether it would have been the same with or without Dawn among them, because the discomfort was due to the incident either way and her presence downstairs probably wouldn’t have changed much, but… Well. Maybe he just needed some fresher air after spending hours working in a confined environment. After everything that happened, he really was tired, too. Maybe he just needed a break.

He had just reached the living room when he heard some knocking on the main door; without thinking, he sighed and slowly walked to it before opening—

… Wait. Who could be at the main door, in this timeline, at this moment, when Alphys was downstairs, Dawn was in the kitchen, and everyone else was supposed to be anywhere but here?

Well, he had already turned the handle. It was too late to pretend that nobody was home.

“Good morning, Sans.” went the cheerful, totally oblivious voice of Grillby. “It’s been a while.”

Sans was hit by the irrepressible urge to face-palm.

When he had sent that text mentioning lunch, had Grillby taken it literally? As in, right the next day and in Snowdin?

“… h-heya, grillbs.” He grinned forcedly, hiding his nervousness as best he could and praying that nobody would appear in the frame of the door while he tried to shield the view of the inside of the house. Which, given his small stature, was a losing battle. “what… brings you here? _{if you don’t mind me askin.}”

“Everybody is coming back. Didn’t you hear the King last week?” Seeing the skeleton’s horrified look, which he mistook for mere surprise, the fire elemental thought a bit more. “... Oh. Now that I’m thinking about it, you probably weren’t there when we talked about it.”

Everybody was coming back.

Sans had no idea what to do with this revelation, except from desperately trying to tone down the “we’re doomed” thought that repeated itself in cycles in his skull. That had never happened before… But then again, as far as he could remember, that was the only time the world took so long before going back to the beginning, especially in a timeline during which the kid had died, so…

Still. Shouldn’t Alphys have warned him about this?!

He was going to have a word with her, as soon as the immediate problem in front of him was taken care of.

“In any case,” Grillby continued joyfully while pulling out a hamburger and a bottle of ketchup from his bag, “since we’re all back in town, I wanted to give you a small surprise and encouragement. It must have been hard for you to stay here all alone. Maybe you should join us tonight, we planned a small party for our return; nothing too fancy, it’s just so we could spend some time together after what happened.”

“that’s… oh geez.” Sans seized the gifts with clumsy bony hands, knowing less and less how to react. “um… thanks. i… that’s really, nice of you?”

The taller monster chuckled deeply, readjusting his glasses. “You’re very welcome. I missed you too, you know. During these hard times, we must... stick together.” He brought his hands behind his back and waited in front of the door, still. Seeing that Sans was not moving either… he finally seemed to understand that he was actually not as welcome as he had anticipated. “Um...... Is this the wrong moment?”

Sans’s expression lit up in fake realization. “actually, it’s the… generator. it’s unstable. i should prolly go back to it before it, y’know, explodes or somethin.”

Come on, this is so easy. Everyone knows that’s her cue.

Dawn chose this exact moment to excitedly leave the kitchen with a large plate in her hands and a smile that brightened as soon as she saw Alphys walk up the stairs.

“Oh hey!” she called out to the lizard scientist with enthusiasm, not having given a single glance at the front door. “There’s almost nothing but Bolognese spaghetti in the fridge so I wanted to try something a bit different, but all I could find was some random stuff and Pesto sauce. So I made Pesto sandwiches. It doesn’t taste as bad as it sounds.” She smiled and took one of the small sandwiches in question, biting into it and…

… and finally noticing the two other monsters present in the room. She froze in place and widened her eyes, barely managing to keep her hold on the plate.

Grillby remained perfectly still, facing a human standing almost twice as tall as the one who had been witnessed to murder every single monster that met its path, wearing an apron way too large for her, having just attempted to cook, and having just admitted to living quietly in this house as if it had been a perfectly normal habit for at least some time.

Grillby lowered his invisible eyes to stare back at Sans, who was somehow visibly sweating and smiling way too widely.

“.............. I suppose this means you didn’t make it in time for the generator.”

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“I’m going to make a wild guess and assume you didn’t plan to tell anyone about this.”

Yep, Grillby was pissed. It was high time Sans said something to salvage the situation with his usual great eloquence.

“not… really, no.”

Aw, come on. I know you can do better than that.

If anyone had ever doubted Sans’s ability to breathe, now was the moment when the most obvious confirmation was made that yes, magic skeleton monsters could, and most probably needed, to breathe. Especially when the afore-mentioned skeleton was stuck in a sticky situation in which one of his oblivious acquaintances was about to either have his mind blown in the worst way possible, or cause the imminent death of another of his acquaintances either by his own hand, or by the hand of another monster as soon as he would set an angry mob after them.

The choice was supposed to be easy. Blowing Grillby’s mind would not even have lasting consequences, since the time jump “Reset” he had planned on causing at the end should erase the impending existential crisis and potential loss of sanity— not to mention that, right now, the fire elemental’s sanity seemed to be already hanging by a thread and ready to be lost either way.

But, still. This choice meant that they would have to deal with said existential crisis for as long as they would need before they could fix everything, and although Grillby was quite the chill guy, this was bound to be a major hindrance.

Not to mention the fact that before dealing with the existential crisis per se, they would have to find a way to bring up the topic in the first place, and bring about favorable conditions for him to listen to their explanations, instead of doing what he was certainly thinking to be the most reasonable choice in such situation, that was to say, take care of the obvious public danger in the room, whether pacifistically or… possibly less so.

Okay. Start small.

“uuh… yeah, haha. heh.” Sans mimed some stage coughing. “um, grillbs, this is dawn. dawn, grillby.”

The human looked surprised by his course of action, but gladly followed his lead as she smiled and made a shy “Hi…” and an encouraging small wave with her free hand.

Grillby did not move an inch, although his fire crackled a bit. Defensively, or as an intimidation trick, she wasn’t sure.

“..... Sans. I have known you for almost three years. I really want to believe you’re not completely out of your mind.” The former barman sighed deeply, bringing a flaming hand to the alleged location of his forehead and rubbing it tiredly. “But the more I think about how much I really know about you, the more I realize. I don’t know you at all.”

“l-look, uh… long story short, stuff happened. lots of stuff.” Sans did his best to keep a confident eye contact, but he was failing nonetheless. “maybe you could, uh… you wanna come inside? we can take a seat, have a nice chat, and explain all this… stuff?”

He remained perfectly still, emphasizing his intense skepticism. “You mean “stuff” like your tab that you promised countless times would somehow pay itself as soon as time would jump back, all the nonsense you say when you’re drunk about paradoxes in parallel universes, undetectable anomalies and mad scientists dying in their own past, or the Timeline Ketchup Incident?”

Sans grew pale. “please don’t bring up the tki, i swear it has nothin to do with it.” he said hurriedly. Then he paused, thinking thoroughly about what he had heard and shocked to realize that Grillby had caught up on that much throughout the years, even though he did not seem to take any of it seriously. “in fact it’s, uh, none of the above. it’s complicated. but, i swear we can explain if you just—”

“You can explain why you favored staying here and looking after a human instead of helping us survive all this time, even though the last human you assisted decimated most of the kingdom and half of my regular patrons and dear friends.” he interrupted bluntly, crossing his arms. He soon added for emphasis: “Our. Dear friends.”

… Yeah. A majority of the victims from Snowdin were part of the Royal Guard, and a huge part of the Royal Guard’s Snowdin division comprised the late members of the Canine Unit. Sans realized this was the first time in a while that he gave these guys even a single thought, and that the last time was long before the beginning of this timeline.

Maybe he really had stopped caring a lot more than he wanted to admit… yikes. He did like these guys, though…

Ugh. He really hoped that once all this mess would be over, he’d be able to care about everyone again, and for real.

But in the meantime… What was he supposed to say?

Behind him in the living room, Alphys was still in the doorframe on top of the stairs, and could be barely considered to be in the room at all. She was frozen in place, obviously thinking hard about what she could do to try to help, but sadly she had never met this guy face to face before and had no idea how to deal with him, especially because most of her thoughts were focusing on trying to simply understand what had happened in the first place.

Dawn had remained as still as she could be at first, the only conclusions to her analysis of the situation stating that maybe moving would be the worst possible thing to do at the moment.

Ugh, of course. Why are the patient ones always so boring? They never do anything!

But, then again… Sans seemed to be stuck in a mental infinite loop, Grillby was not amused, and Alphys was giving her panicked looks so her coming to the rescue was probably not going to happen anytime soon. The universe needed a catalyst so time could unfreeze, and preferably this catalyst had to be someone other than Grillby.

“L-look… H-h-hey.” she called out timidly, making another hand wave that she wished looked as friendly as she intended it. “I know this sounds nuts, e-especially with what’s been going on— I-i mean I probably don’t know the details of everything, but…”

Sans sent her the distressed “what are you doing” look, and this wordless yet passionate moral support quickly had the fantastic effect of making her realize, first of all, that she had no idea how to answer this question, and second, just how badly she screwed up.

Then again, maybe the skeleton’s mere act of turning his skull around to give her that look had been a mistake, too.

A burning dry breeze brushed her cheek and swept her hair out of the way of the surrounding howling wind, followed by a thundering crashing sound in the wall behind her. Seeing the large magic bullets that were now floating right behind the fire elemental’s back, Dawn understood that this was his way of politely asking her to mind her own business, and that at least he had been enough of a gentleman to give her a fair warning instead of, for example, immediately aiming for her. Either that or his aim was terrible, but given the distance between them she wanted to think that the first option was the more likely.

Either way, in response to this, she awkwardly pursed her lips, gestured to zip her mouth shut, and carefully took a step back. This seemed to appease the monster at least a bit because, although the bullets remained, they did seem to lose some consistence and somewhat shrink in size.   . Alphys judged this to be the moment to take action, and sneakily walked to the human’s side before ushering her back down in the basement and closing the door behind their path. During the procedure, the two other monsters merely stared at the girls’ antics, their heads slowly turning to follow them with their nonexistent eyes.

As soon as they vanished from view, Sans made it clear that he had not taken Grillby’s exploitation of his single second of distraction lightly.

“what the hell, man? you thought we’d attack you on sight or what?!”

“Well, not you.” he conceded calmly, though the palpable hesitation in his wording and invisible glare conveyed easily his implied doubts. Thankfully, after saying these words, his bullets vanished completely.

“… heh. y’know, it’s funny, ‘cause I’m the one with the highest kill count in this house.” the skeleton said carefully and with noticeable regret, but also and most importantly, with a grave tone and menacing frown on his darkening sockets. “well technically i’ve just been killin the same kid over and over, so it’s debatable whether that counts as one kill or as however many times that makes by now. either way, that doesn’t change anything. it just looks like your instincts aren’t workin right today.”

This seemed to effectively freeze Grillby in place. Whether he took this not-so-subtle threat figuratively or literally, it appeared that, unfortunately, he did not interpret Sans’s attempt at a sarcastic joke the way the skeleton had originally meant it. Granted, Sans was now pissed as well, so his cryptic wording and ticked off temper did not help convey the initial meaning, which was: ‘appearances can be deceiving, so try to open your eyes and keep an open mind.’

Instead, although he had refused to believe it until these last words came out, the fire elemental gathered the most alarming message: Sans was actually a traitor to his kind, and/or considerably more likely to be mentally insane.

The former bartender was not sure which one of these two options was the worst; but no matter the conclusion, he knew that he could not handle this alone. He needed help.

Grillby’s left foot subtly glided a few inches backwards, as he carefully shifted his weight onto it. And then Sans saw him turn around and dash towards the rest of the town at high speed, too little too late.

During the fleeting half second he could afford to use to think, Sans tried to find a way to stop him that would be all at once pacifistic, efficient, and subtle. He had the time to remind himself that using magic would be neither pacifistic, nor subtle. However, considering the next step, he lacked too much time to properly avoid hasty decisions.

Grillby was forced to stop in his tracks when the short body of a way too familiar skeleton literally materialized right in front of him, out of nowhere and without any warning.

Well, ‘stopping in his tracks’ would not really be the most appropriate wording, since the poor monster did not have enough time before the collision to process that he had to stop in order to avoid colliding with the obstacle that just appeared less than three feet in front of him, and as a consequence, collision did occur, and soon both monsters landed in the snow, one on top of the other.

Well. At least, Sans thought, the attempt to stop him from running had been a… let’s say, half success.

Too shocked by the weirdness of the phenomenon he had just witnessed, Grillby forgot that he was in a position that would have easily allowed him to overpower his poor mentally disoriented friend, and instead he scuttled away from him, taken over by a senseless yet overwhelming fear.

“D… Did you just…?” He kept rambling tensely, his flames crackling as he turned his head repeatedly between Sans’s current location and the faraway, open doorframe of his house, assessing the distance. “How the hell did you… so quickly…?”

Sans slowly stood up and brushed himself off, sighing tiredly and slightly tilting his skull in slow horizontal movements. “trust me, that part’s not important.” When he was fully standing and raised his pupils back towards him, he met Grillby’s intensely disapproving glare. He face-palmed. “… well, ok, i can teleport. been able to do that for a while, too. that does sound like something important to mention. i get it. but that’s not the point.”

Grillby’s stance became tenser and warier. If his eyes were visible, Sans could have seen him squint them. “Is this really teleporting, or rather…?”

The skeleton sighed one more time, burying his hands in his hoodie’s pockets and letting his shoulders slump down in an attempt to look as harmless and friendly as he could.

“teleporting, grillbs. trust me, i would know if i had time powers, ‘cause that would’ve been a LOT more convenient for, like, literally everything that happened in my life.”

Despite his efforts, once more he had found himself unable to hide his sarcasm and irritation. Of course he would have expected such confusion and prejudice to come out of him; or out of any other monster in general, for that matter. This was the exact reason why he had kept his shortcuts a secret in the first place, after all.

When he saw that his answer didn’t seem to reassure his old friend to the slightest, he deadpanned.

“… this isn’t helpin make my case, is it.”

“No, it isn’t.” Grillby shook his head slowly, sounding almost apologetic in his tone. Almost.

Sans rubbed his skull exasperatingly. This wasn’t going anywhere. “grillby… please, give us a chance. i know this is crazy, but i SWEAR i can explain.”

He gave a quick glance at the rest of the town— most of the local inhabitants and his former neighbors were indeed back and working together to put everything back in place, but thankfully they did not seem to be paying them too much attention for the time being.

“You say that a lot,” the barman nodded calmly, “but you never did tell me anything.”

“well…” He sighed. Again. “yeah, fair. but, look, it’s the kind of stuff that i definitely wouldn’t expect you to believe right off the bat— we have proof to show you, but… i’d really prefer talkin about it indoors if you don’t mind.” He raised at him a pair of distressed, begging pupils. “please. al and the human will stay in the basement if you want. i promise we won’t do anythin, but it’s REALLY important that you keep the secret.”

“Sans, there is a human living in your house, and the Royal Scientist herself has kept this a secret along with you.” Judging from his tone and attitude, it was becoming more and more obvious that Grillby’s chill was actually starting to falter for good. “Knowing what her other secrets were like, I’m afraid it’s a lot more difficult for me to think that there is nothing dangerous with whatever it is you have been doing all this time. I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew about the Amalgamates, too. You didn’t look nearly as surprised as we did during the evacuation.”

A shiver ran down Sans’s spine when a dozen bullets materialized around him. Grillby did not wish to harm him, but they were effectively blocking the way to his house.

“Sans, this has gone on long enough. If this really isn’t a danger for us, then prove it. To everyone.”

“i can’t!” Sans blurted out in panic. He quickly regained his composure, or at least attempted to, but in any case he was becoming desperate. “look, trust me on this, i’d LOVE to do just that, ‘cause keeping secrets sucks. but i know for a fact that if some people learn about this, even if we’re LITERALLY working to save the world here, they still won’t listen. and even if that sounds crazy, the KEY part of the plan is that i NEED that human to stay safe if we wanna save everyone.”

The fire elemental stayed in place, slowly trembling in concern… But soon he shook his head sadly, sighing in despair. “... I don’t even know why I’m still trying to reason with you.”

The implications in his tone were numerous, and coupled with the growing bullets hovering around them and at the ready, it appeared that an actual fight was now becoming more and more unavoidable. Which is exactly why Sans did the first thing he could think about to effectively avoid it.

In a blink, a bony hand appeared out of nowhere and grabbed Grillby’s arm, and then he suddenly vanished from view after being yanked by said hand, while his bullets remained in place in the air but quickly started falling due to gravity before they imploded into tiny, harmless shreds of magic. Sans froze in place, as he apparently needed to rethink his exact actions and fully process what he just did in the span of the past half second.

Which location did he focus on when he had shoved him through his shortcut, again? He remembered having the mental image of just about any kind of locked, inescapable room. Maybe he’d sent him in the small cave behind that big waterfall. That’s the sort of place he definitely wouldn’t be able to get out of all by himself. Whoops.

Weeeeelp. Problem… solved?

… Oh who was he kidding. He’d only made it worse.

Much, much worse.

It took maybe about a full half minute before Grillby could even wrap his mind around what had just happened. But when he saw the dark landscape of Waterfall, the loud, crushing sound of water near him, and the bioluminescent plant life surrounding what appeared to be a mini-cave behind a literal wall of water… Well, he had never stepped foot in this place in his past, that much was for sure; it appeared that when Sans had described his strange ability as ‘teleporting’, he had not lied after all.

Still. Fire elemental. Surrounded by water. Bad idea.

He pulled out his cell phone, pondering who he should call for help… But then again, when he gave another thorough look at the waterfall, it appeared that there was no way out of this room other than by going through it, and even if someone could bring him protection like an umbrella, he would still need to walk directly into the river, and he didn’t know how deep it was. So with or without help, there was no way he was going anywhere near that thing.

So… It did appear like his only real way out was through literal teleportation, after all. Which meant that the only person he could rely on was the one who had put him here in the first place. Just his luck.

Would Sans… really just leave him here? Part of him still wanted to hope and have some sort of lingering faith in what he had believed to be a rather funny and close friend for the past few years, but the more he thought about the facts, the more his cold reason told him that, demented as he had just proven to be… Maybe his friend really wasn’t one at all, in the end. And he was now paying the price for his kindness and gullibility. Maybe he should have killed that human when he had the chance…

Meh, who was he kidding. He wasn’t a murderer. He really didn’t have it in him anyway. Maybe it would have been easier if that human did turn out to have done some… well, human stuff. But even if Sans had kept it safe because it were harmless… It still remained a danger and major hindrance to monsterkind. The kingdom needed a lot more resources to survive, especially after what had happened with the last human. They needed the Surface, now more than ever. And they had six souls! Seven, even, if Sans bothered to share. Couldn’t he understand that…?

Well… It wasn’t like any of this would matter to him now.

He leaned his back against the wall facing the waterfall and let himself glide against its rocky yet smooth surface, slowly sitting on the floor and pondering his options… But soon, he just sighed in despair.

What could he do now…? He was definitely stuck.

“Howdy!”

Grillby jumped, then jerked his head towards the origin of that insufferably saccharine voice. Wait, was that… a tiny talking flower? He hadn’t seen vegetal monsters in years. Probably had to do with living in Snowdin. The cold weather definitely wasn’t good for them.

Then again, he sensed that there was something… off with this one. This did not feel like a monster at all, he knew that there was something, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“Boy, isn’t that unexpected.”

Whether the stranger had waited for an answer or not, he didn’t seem to care. Instead, he merely continued, always with that chirpy, seemingly childish voice:

“You know, I was never interested in you specifically, before. You always stay at your pub and all, it’s so boring. I mean, I don’t blame you for that, of course it’s just your job. But you’re quite the chill guy, you probably would’ve been a lot more fun to hang out with earlier if you weren’t always staying there all day.” Before the monster could even think of asking it what it was talking about, the flower beamed and cut him short, even if he had not even said anything yet. “But now! What a wonderful surprise it is to see you do new things like this! You’re a GEM, I’ll tell you that. And you know what? That thing you did was SO entertaining, I feel like rewarding you right now.”

An awkward silence fell in the room, save for the howling sound of the waterfall eternally falling a few feet away from them. They seemed to be on a staring contest, starting from that point.

… Grillby had so. Many questions.

“... Rewarding me.” he carefully repeated with an emotionless tone after some time, wary and skeptical.

“Yes!” it grinned. “I’m sure you must have a LOT of questions about what this mess was aaaaall about, don’t you?” Somehow, even without anything other than its stem to move around, it managed to make some sort of proud pose. “Luckily for you, I happen to know a lot of things about this place. I can explain everything you want.”

The bartender remained entirely still, staring at it. “.......... I was actually expecting you to call for help and get me out of here, honestly.”

“Psh. Priorities, am I right?” the plant rolled its eyes, laughing as if it had heard something completely absurd. “I’m sure the trashbag will come back and get you, eventually.” It paused to think for a bit… then an evil, mocking smirk appeared on its face. “… Unless he doesn’t. In which case, yeah, I guess you’re in some pretty big trouble right now.”

............. Moving on from the fact that this strange talking creature was not lending the slightest bit of compassion or care to his situation and that for some reason, it seemed to see it as “entertaining” to an extent important enough that it was finding some reason to think of it as hilarious.

Grillby had no idea what this being, that he was now certain was not a monster, was here for, or was in general, but one thing he could tell was that it was not to be trusted.

Part of him found himself still hoping that Sans would actually come back, but…

Well, he still had some sort of evil demonic flower to keep distracted for the time being. Maybe playing its game would keep it from having… possibly deranged ideas. Chatting was harmless; and thankfully, being a bartender was a synonym to being a great listener, too.

Making it talk should keep it busy for some time. The best conversation starter came to his mind naturally:

“You know what Sans is doing. Don’t you.”

Flowey’s grin expanded, demonically slicing his entire face.

“Ooh, I can tell you a lot about him alright.”

Alphys was freaking out. Sans was walking rapidly in circles. Dawn was waiting patiently but worriedly in a corner.

“You got him stuck behind a WATERFALL!?” Alphys shrieked.

“look, i panicked, okay?!” he retorted hurriedly. Although he was still pacing, he tried to slow down and breathe, regaining his composure and ability to think. “i’ll go back to him and try to save the situation as much as it can be saved by now. in the meantime— al, i need you to put the time machine back to the way it was this morning as fast as you can, and reboot it. and dawn…”

When he met her eyes, his walking finally came to a stop. The human patiently waited for him to give her his orders without pressuring him, although she couldn’t help but look down in shame, thinking that he had to be hesitating because she was literally useless in this kind of situation and that, probably, involving her in anything right now would only make things worse.

Sans looked conflicted and terrified, at best. She could see him shaking and the sound of bones rattling sent shivers down her spine, even from a distance.

Eventually, he tore his pupils away from her and squinted his sockets to an extent she had never seen before, as he finally completed his sentence:

“… get ready to reset.”

Dawn’s eyes widened like saucers. “Wait, WHAT!?”

Her immediate outburst completely overpowered the sound of Alphys’s toolbox crashing to the ground.

“S-Sans,” she quickly added in a shy voice, “I’m n-not against it, but— are you sure…?”

He sighed heavily, avoiding her look. “i definitely don’t want you to do it. but if we can’t find a way to make sure he won’t tell on us, i think we won’t have any other choice than to erase that event from the timeline. i dunno, next time you’ll just go back to the basement and i’ll invite him for lunch and then make sure to keep him distracted, or…”

“I— I-I got that part.” she cut him short, shaking her head with her eyes closed and flailing her arms around nervously. “I’m just— I’ve never Reset before! I don’t even know how that’s supposed to work, or what I have to do, and— What if I mess up and go too far back in time or something? I don’t want to erase everything! And what about Alphys…?”

At the mention of her name, they both went to stare anxiously at the lizard in question.

“I-I… I’ll be fine.” she assured, looking away. “Either way… I won’t even be able to tell the difference.” she smiled weakly.

This seemed to comfort Sans in his idea. Nonetheless… the arguments Dawn had pointed out brought an even more noticeable tension to him, as if he had just realized the possibility that, indeed, she might have a lot less control over her ability than he had assumed.

He should have expected this. This power was supposed to be literally against the most basic laws of nature. Of course he couldn’t expect anyone to figure out something that was supposed to be impossible to achieve in such a short time and without any sort of training or catalyst.

“look, i… i don’t know how time jumping works either— in your head, i mean. i know what’s going on with the universe when that happens, but i don’t know if that’ll help you figure it out and we don’t really have time for a thermodynamics lesson right now.” he mumbled uneasily. “just… look, if we turn on the machine again, no matter how far back you go, i’ll be able to catch up. even if, yeah, if you can go back to, uh, just about thirty minutes or an hour ago, that’ll be great. or just go back to this morning if it’s too hard to figure out, i don’t know.”

Panic seemed to have overcome him again, even if he marked a pause to try to take a breath. That could definitely not be good news.

“either way, i’d like the time machine to be ready before you do that. i don’t have any codeword for “we messed up and had to go back in time but the machine was out during that time”, so i don’t think it’d be a good idea for you to jump back if i won’t remember it. so take your time to just… wrap your head around it for now, i guess?” He stayed still for a few more seconds, tilting his skull repeatedly so he could look at both of them one after the other with an anxious look. “anyway, i really should go right now. can i count on you two for the backup plan…?”

The girls shared a concerned look, but they quickly turned back towards him and assured him that the plan was understood and that they would follow it. Trusting them but not the least bit reassured, Sans soon vanished.

Alphys immediately went back to work. Dawn considered offering her help in order to get the machine back in action sooner, but the way too fresh memory of the incident quickly came back, as well as the fact that they had agreed that she would stop helping in the basement in order to exactly stop this kind of accident from occurring again.

Besides, Sans had given her a very important mission as well. She had no idea how to go through with it and really hoped that it would not come down to this, but just in case… She had to prepare for this eventuality.

The ability to Reset was linked to the amount of determination someone, or something had (since Sans expected his machine to be able to act that way); and in her specific case, her determination, just like any human’s, was most probably gathered somewhere inside her SOUL.

So… Maybe she had to try to find that determination and use it for something? Which implied that she had to be more familiar with the fact that she now had a SOUL, first.

When Sans and Alphys had done this magic thing that made her SOUL visible, the first thing she had noticed was just how huge it felt. And Sans had confirmed it— it was apparently much bigger than the regular humans’ SOULs were supposed to look like. Also, no matter who had initiated the trick, that big heart stuck in her chest had looked cyan both times— unless it was turquoise…? She wondered if the SOUL traits could be considered to be some sort of spectrum, instead of distinct categories.

Either way, according to the game’s lore, it seemed that her trait was ‘Patience’… She had to admit, that was fitting, to some extent. But still… even though it had never been explicitly said through the canon, the fandom usually took it as obvious that Patience was the most passive trait— sort of like the opposite of determination.

She had never wanted this to be true and she had always thought that the amalgam ‘Patient means waiting it out and doing nothing’ was way too simplistic, as well as insulting and kind of infuriating. She was waiting a lot and she could stay still for relatively long periods of time alone with her thoughts, but it was only because she preferred judging when she was needed to stay on the sidelines, and when she was needed to act. She was not being passive; she simply saw it as, well, observing, and thinking before acting so she could make sure that when she did get on the move, it’d be to do something worth being done.

Most of the time, she knew what she wanted to do with her life, and there were few things that could deter her from doing what she wanted.

So… Yeah. She had to brush aside that fanon prejudice. She had determination, and she was going to use it if that was what she wanted to do.

The more she thought about these things, and the more she reminisced how it had felt when Sans or Alphys were doing their trick to show her SOUL around, the more she could now feel that something was indeed there, inside her chest, pounding at a slightly different rate than her regular heart. She would be lying if she said that this situation wasn’t weirding her out, but… She still felt some sort of fascination towards this novelty.

That, and the fact that she had a mission. She had to stay focused on the real goal, there.

Concentrating her attention on the feeling of her SOUL beating inside her chest became strangely soothing, after a certain point.

She was deliberately trying not to focus on the idea of Resets just yet in fear that just thinking about doing a Reset would accidentally trigger it too early, but in the meantime, this strange meditation made her feel like she was learning more about herself than she had ever before.

Waiting for Sans to return, either with good news or with the order to Reset, she closed her eyes and relaxed, lulled by the funny rhythm the desynchronization between her heart and her SOUL created. She had always loved music, and she found this one especially inspiring.

Listening to the music of her life, she would wait.

She would be Patient.

“......... A video game.” Grillby deadpanned. “Is that all? I didn’t expect you to tell the truth, but I thought you’d give a story a bit more credible than this.”

“Oh, you don’t believe me?” Flowey pretended to look offended, but it was obvious that it was merely mockingly so. “It’s really easy to prove, you know.”

The monster merely shook his head in disbelief.

Alternate universes, he could wrap his mind around it. Sans often mentioned something about alternate timelines when he was drunk. An alternate universe where the laws of physics were different and magic was not a common part of it, he could imagine it. Well, he had trouble figuring out what exactly it could look like and how the people living in that sort of world could deal with their daily lives without having the possibility to use magic, but why not.

But then. Sans remembering time loops? The last human being controlled by another human from one of these worlds who was playing a video game? This was ridiculous.

“This doesn’t make sense.” he huffed sternly. “Video games run on numbers and scripts, if I’m not mistaken. I may not be a scientist, but as far as I’m concerned, reality doesn’t work that way.” He looked around them in the small cave, giving lazy nods towards the mushrooms and other members of the local ecosystem: “Does all of this look like a video game to you? Strangely, I don’t seem to see that many pixels.”

“Well, sure, when you see it like that, I guess you won’t get to see it that easily.” the flower rolled its eyes, mocking annoyance and disinterest. “But if you know how to look at it properly…”

The being locked its eyes on him, gazing with an eerie intensity. Grillby felt watched in a way that he was certain he had never experienced before.

Suddenly the flower’s smirk expanded horrendously.

Grillby was not given the chance to say or do anything to question this behavior, because immediately something appeared out of nowhere, without making any sound.

* GRILLBY 28 ATK 17 DEF
* Clearly needs a reality check.

“… You can get some very precious information about the people around you, thanks to this.” it continued, grinning like a demon but sounding carefree and delighted as ever. “You get to learn a lot of things about your surroundings and neighbors. What they’re like. What they do in their lives. Their strengths… Their weaknesses.” There was a small humorous huff when it read the flavor text. “Hee hee. Maybe you do need someone to help you set things straight. I guess little old me will have to do.”

“T-this is… What is this?” Grillby nervously and cautiously walked closer to the hovering, yet immobile black rectangle. He tried to observe it under a few different angles, but quickly discontent washed over him as he fully regained his composure. “..... You’re the one making this, right. This is just a bullet shaped like a pixelated box.”

“Well duh, of course I’m doing this.” It rolled its eyes again, as if all he had said was nothing but random absurdities. Again. “The game’s the one making up the numbers for most monsters here, though.”

The fire elemental carefully took a few steps back when the flower made its way closer to the pixel-y floating dialogue box, not the least bit fazed by a view that definitely did not belong in this world.

Then again, if it were the one who created it in the first place as he was guessing, it was only normal to not be surprised by your own abilities; but on the other hand… The more he stared at this otherworldly shape, standing eerily still and frozen in space and time, the more he was convinced that if, indeed, the flower was the one doing it… The raw power and control it had over its magic capabilities attained extremely worrying levels he had never seen in his life, let alone dared imagine.

The pure perfection in the shape of this rectangle and its letters, the perfection of its stillness, the perfection of its colors and how perfectly clear the separation between the black and white parts were… Even if the feeling it diffused made it clear that it was composed of nothing but pure, basic magic, and was supposed to act just like any sort of bullet of the most regular kind, Grillby had never seen this kind of flawless mastery before.

Even the bullets of the most talented monsters had some sort of flaw in their symmetry, or would move in small, irregular patterns due to the influence of parameters the monster had no control upon, such as potential winds or local gradients in temperature or magic concentration.

This perfection arriving from outside of time and space… This was not only unnatural. This was literally thwarting all the laws of physics he knew and had never learned about.

“I don’t think any player got to see your stats before, what with you never going out to fight.” A thin yet flexible vine rose out of the ground and went to gently touch the numbers on the flying black screen, as the flower watched it with amusement. “They’re not too bad, I guess. Maybe they’d be higher if you got to some more serious training from time to time.”

The vine lightly poked the bottom right corner of the box, and immediately the text disappeared and the rectangle rapidly shrank until the window it represented became too small to keep track of.

That was definitely not how magic bullets were supposed to disintegrate when their summoner dismissed them.

Grillby was still far from convinced, but even if he did not count the small doubts that started to form in his mind, the mere thought was enough.

Even if this “video game” talk were nothing but an absurd fabrication coming from the mouth of a being who was obviously lying through its teeth, denying the veracity of this preposterous tale would only leave him with the idea that this tiny talking flower, who would hypothetically have enough power to pull this off without any visible effort, would have made everything up just to mess with his mind and drive him insane.

Which, admittedly, was actually starting to work.

The flower went back to staring at him with that same cheery grin and those soul-devouring eyes.

“I’m not gonna lie: under the game’s perspective, you’re pretty boring. I don’t know what the players find in you, you hardly ever say any lines! You’re just some random background NPC. You never even get out of your pub.” It had said all this with a dejected, almost disappointed tone… Yet, immediately it bobbled its face up and down in extreme delight. “That’s why this is so exciting! It’s the first time I’ve had something new about you in FOREVER! Sure, there’s probably not much going on in your life since you do exactly the same thing every day even without counting the Resets, but still! Now you’re out of the loop! There’s GOT to be something interesting we can do with this, don’t you think?”

...Define “interesting.”, Grillby did not dare say out loud. He should definitely not encourage it.

For some very strange and unexpected reason, his instincts told him that he did not want to find out what this thing’s definition of the term was.

Sadly, he quickly found out that he did not really have a say in the matter. The being came to face him eagerly in what he quickly recognized to be a battle stance, and it gave him an encouraging and enthusiastic look. Definitely not willing to battle that thing but definitely not willing to die stupidly because he would not even try to defend himself, the monster found no other choice but to at least stand on his feet and brace himself for whatever was going to happen.

The one thing he had not planned for, was for the entirety of the world to turn to black and disappear.

He looked around in panic, but there really was nothing more around them other than himself and the Thing. Well, not for long: as soon as the flower asked him rhetorically if he was ready (he was obviously not, but it wasn’t like it would care for his opinion), multiple other dialogue box-shaped bullets appeared between them, this time going in a variety of colors, sizes and contents in the text and numbers they displayed. Grillby recognized some that were probably meant to look like button options, and some voice in the back of his mind snarked that he knew he should have taken some time to play some video games with his young son more often, because if he had then at least maybe he wouldn’t feel that lost and disoriented at the options laid before him.

“This is what the fights look like in the game. Well, technically they’re called ‘Encounters’ instead, but you get my point.” the thing explained excitedly. Then it showed a wide grin. “So! Convinced yet?”

If this meant that it would leave him alone, Grillby was very willing to say ‘yes’ just to please it and hope that it would free him from whatever this void place was.

When it saw his slow nod, though, it appeared that it had wished for a more expressive response. Too bad, because he was not going to freak out openly on that thing. He could not afford to show any sort of weakness right now.

“Aw, come on! This is going to be fun!” it called out impatiently, with the exact same tone as the one of an innocent child asking a grown-up to play with it. “Try to do something!”

The last thing he wanted to do was to play along in such unnatural setting, but once more, he quickly reasoned that following that ungodly brat’s wishes would be the best way he would maximize his chances of survival. Grillby looked down at the buttons laid before him, not so willing to enter this sociopath’s game, but at least confused and concerned enough to look for answers.

While the ‘FIGHT’ option appeared somewhat tempting given the circumstances, he wanted to stay prudent. It was foolish to attack something when you didn’t even know just how powerful it could be, and if that damned creature was indeed the one creating all of this, then challenging it to an actual magic fight was beyond suicidal.

He gave a quick look at his other options, and thought that the button ‘ACT’ was probably the more appealing option. ‘Acting’ would surely give him a wider range of actions he could indeed pull off, assuming the name was to be trusted. However… When he tried to lift an arm and press that button, nothing happened.

He struggled. Couldn’t move his body.

He tried to speak. He found himself unable to do so.

The flower’s demonic face was the most hideous and horrifying image he had ever laid eyes upon.

“You can’t.” it smirked in sadistic victory. “Because this isn’t your turn.”

The fire elemental kept trying to fight against this invisible, ruthless force that maintained him paralyzed in place, but it was hopeless.

Just what kind of sorcery was this…? This thing was doing this, it had to. But if he had to choose between these phenomena being caused by a video game of some kind, or being the effects of some sick creature’s evil intents… He could not fathom the extent of the power it would hold— let alone when its intentions were so malevolent.

Grillby found himself believing that he almost preferred the option that his reality was a video game. This thought… He was not sure whether he should find it revolting or appealing, given the current circumstances.

“So! It’s my turn!” it exclaimed excitedly, stating the cruel obvious state of reality. “Hey, you wanna know what’s going to happen if I press that ‘FIGHT’ button?”

He could not move. Aiming just about any sort of blow against him would be so easy. Had this been why so many monsters had died to the hands of a human child, including the best soldiers of the entire kingdom? Had this been because they literally couldn’t dodge or defend themselves against any of the attacks launched at them…? When this human child was roaming through the Underground still alive, was this what they used to kill their victims? Humans were not supposed to be able to use magic— not in such way. So if the human was not doing this… What did?

Struggling but unable to move even a single finger, when the flower’s vine came closer to that FIGHT button as he could do nothing but listen to that psychopathic laugh, the revelation finally hit him once and for all. After all, how else could he explain everything that had happened so far?

The flower had been right all along.

This was a video game. He was in a video game, he was nothing but a meaningless NPC spending the entirety of his existence in his pitiful pub, and he was going to die.

Just as the vine was approaching dangerously this accursed button and about to press it, it stopped. The creature extended its stem so its face could make its way over the dialogue boxes and come to smile at him from up close.

“Hee hee hee, you should see your face. Come on, I was just kidding! Killing you isn’t fun. Not when you can do so many things OTHER than being dead! Being dead is boring, right?”

Before he could process what was happening, the stem retracted back to its former place, and the vine reappeared to press two other buttons he did not bother to read.

Soon, the flavor text shown on his side of the ‘battle screen’ changed to display a new sentence:

* Flowey is sparing you.

Grillby realized he could move again. Instead of pressing any buttons, he used this newfound mobility to nervously step back until he bumped into the wall behind him.

The flower’s smirk of deep satisfaction was wider than ever.

Thank the Angel, when he did collide with that wall, he realized that the black void had faded to leave them exactly in the same place they were standing in before this whole thing had occurred. The buttons and boxes were still there, but they quickly vanished as well.

He was shaking way too much for him to not collapse on the ground and sit in a rush. The intensity of his flames could have disguised his tremors as just their crackling, but this hurried gesture could not be brushed off so easily.

“So! What did you think of your first REAL fight, huh?” God, would that thing ever give him a break? “What? You don’t have any thoughts to share with me?”

If his words were scarce, his glare was hopefully talkative enough. Couldn’t this thing just leave him alone? Wasn’t proving its point enough as it was…?

“Ooh, I see what it is. It’s that whole “I’m just a video game character and I might not even be real and why should life even matter” train of thought, isn’t it. Tsh.”

It rolled its eyes as if this “train of thought” were about the stupidest topic it had ever heard of. But what about it? Shouldn’t this “Flowey” entity be just as much a “character” of that game as he was…?

But if it indeed were, then how could it have known about all this? How could it do what it had just done? Instinctively, Grillby assumed that if no monster in the Underground had been aware of this mechanism before, then maybe it meant that it had to be an ability specific to some very particular entities…

And if this world were indeed confined inside a video game, then the entities in question would be, namely, the players in control of this world and its destiny. Did that mean that ‘Flowey’ was a player itself…?

He knew far too little to find any decisive conclusion, and he was far too tired and done to care. He just wanted this to be over. He just wanted to be left alone, and…

… And what, exactly? Even if he could get out of this place, what would he do with this knowledge? Could he just go back to his life and greet his neighbors so obliviously, when he now knew the truth about their own existence?

Almost as if it could still prove that it could feel empathy after what had happened, Flowey came over to him gently and whispered in what sounded like a caring tone:

“Hey, don’t worry about all this. There’s going to be a Reset, sooner or later. You won’t remember a thing. You’ll get to go back to live your boring life without having to question any of this anymore.”

Did it have any idea that saying this was not helping?

Judging how it immediately dropped the reassuring face and came back to its cheery grin, definitely so.

“Unless you want me to come back to you and give you a little reminder in the next timeline? Just ask!”

It stayed in place, still and patient, for a time that felt way too long for what this thing seemed to be used to.

He merely turned his head resolutely so he would stare at anything but where it was standing.

He wasn’t looking so he could not notice, but at some point the flower froze in place, as if it had just realized something.

“Oh… Looks like it’s almost time for me to make my leave.” it said dejectedly. “Well, now or never, friend! I asked you a question, didn’t you hear?”

Once more, he was only greeted with silence and stillness.

He was not going to give it that credit.

Sighing, Flowey shook its face in overdramatic discontent.

“… Well, I’ll take that as a ‘no’ then. I’ll just let you know, that’s disappointing. I had a lot of fun here. First time in a loooooong while.”

Just be gone already. What could even make that thing feel the need to leave in the first place, anyway?

… No, this wasn’t the right question to ask.

The real question was, did he still have the energy to muster the intent to care about the answer?

Coincidentally or not, about a minute later, a certain skeleton appeared out of thin air and landed near the waterfall. Look who finally decided to show up.

The little guy looked at him with concern and fear, not daring to make any step closer without his permission.

In response, Grillby remained mute and still. Did he know about this “video game” situation? According to what ‘Flowey’ had said, his plan not only proved that he fully acknowledged its existence, but also that he was focusing on “freeing” them from that game’s influence. Just that.

Was that what Sans had had to deal with for so long…? No wonder he drank so much when he thought his brother wouldn’t notice, and no wonder he became so cynical and depressed whenever his mental filters were inhibited.

“… hey.” Sans greeted shyly when he could not bear the silence anymore. He raised his left hand and showed a heavy looking plastic bag. “i brought the grub. it’s not as good as your food, but… i guess dawn tried her best. the sandwiches taste ok.”

The bartender sighed, then looked away.

If he already knew what kind of existence they had and that their entire universe was bent to the will of nothing but a simple machine remote-controlled by humans of all things… What was even the point?

He had stopped caring, probably somewhat reasonably so. Well no, it was far from reasonable; but if he were to be stuck in time loops and live every iteration with this unbearable knowledge, how else could he keep his sanity and stop hurting his own feelings…?

Carefully, the young skeleton went to sit down next to him against the same wall. The fire elemental came to think that since he had not witnessed his discussion with Flowey, maybe he did not know that now he knew, and…

What if he were doing this solely for his sake?

That would be sweet and a nice thanking gesture for the gifts he had given him earlier, but…

“You only came to keep me company for a little while and then let me fade out here, didn’t you...?”

“wha— no, of course not!” Sans looked genuinely hurt and horrified to hear that his friend could ever have such idea in mind. “grillbs, no matter what happens, i’ll get you outta here.”

“Why? Aren’t you worried that I’ll tell the others as soon as I get out? I’m just wasting your time, here. Aren’t I?”

He gave him a worried pair of glowing pupils, but soon he could not afford to raise them towards him. “well… yeah, the safety of the plan’s comin first. but still. the worst that could happen is that if you don’t want to believe us…” He scratched the back of his spine awkwardly. Bad sign. “well, i’ve told the human to jump back in time so you’d forget all about this. would be easy from that point to make sure that accident won’t happen again.” Finally he managed to raise his skull again and let a bright expression of despaired hope shine in his sockets. “but… i’d really prefer if we didn’t have to do that.”

Well… Now that he already knew what he was about to tell him about his plan, it probably was going to make things a lot easier. While he still had to wrap his mind around why exactly Sans would have needed to bring an overpowered human from another dimension for his plan, he could not deny that he fully trusted him regarding his intentions.

Sans offered him one of the sandwiches. He took it politely.

It took him a few moments to realize that Sans was shaking.

“… l-look, i’m. i’m sorry i panicked. for real.” The short skeleton buried his skull between his hands and knees, moaning in guilt. “i didn’t wanna fight you, and if we’d fought then the others could’ve found out, and… i’m really sorry i brought you here. i didn’t think.” He slowly raised his skull back, sending a shy and concerned look at him. “h-how are you holding up, by the way…? do you want me to take us elsewhere for this? i could find a more comfy place to talk. warmer one, too.”

Grillby turned his head away from him, tightening the grip on his crossed, nervous arms. “… It’s fine. Doesn’t matter.”

In the end, it wasn’t that much different from Snowdin. What was ice anyway, if not water about to melt. He just had to look out for puddles, and… that giant screaming wall of death facing them.

Would the waterfall really harm him if it were happening outside of a ‘FIGHT’? He wondered if all these times when monsters would accidentally hurt themselves for just about any reason, some sort of invisible ‘FIGHT’ was triggered somehow and they received damage.

Did they have ‘Hit Points’? All video games had that, right? How many did he have left…?

Sans took a long breath. Apparently, he was not ready to explain anything. And now that he knew what he was about to tell, he could not blame him for being nervous and fearing being taken for even more of a madman than he already had appeared to sound earlier.

“so… i’ll be honest, i’m not really sure where to begin. there’s really a lot to it.”

“..... Maybe starting from the beginning would be best.” Grillby tried to encourage.

“heh. true.” he chuckled. “so… what exactly do you know? guess i’ll just try to take it from there.”

So he was letting him choose the conversation starter, huh.

Grillby hesitated, but as he thought back of what had all happened before he arrived… He honestly couldn’t care less about answers. He had had more than enough already.

Part of him argued that maybe keeping Sans up to date with this encounter would be preferable, but… He really just didn’t want to talk about it. Chances were, if he could remember the time loops and knew about the game’s existence already, he wouldn’t be teaching him anything new. He probably had met that thing himself in the past.

So instead of talking about the unpleasant present…

“I know that you and your brother moved in from Hotland about three years ago. We first met when you came at the bar some time after that...” he said, reminiscing the events with a fondness he had never truly had the opportunity to discover, let alone cherish. “You hated the fact that you had to move at all. I remember you saying that it was your foster family’s idea and that you didn’t have a say in it because your brother made the final decision.”

“yeah, totally got me.” Sans laughed. “crazy how people can change. i would’ve never guessed i’d ever feel at home in this ol’ town. yet here we are.”

“I remember the day you two arrived. Your brother was doing his best to be the sweetest neighbor we could have...
... You showed up later, wearing thongs and sunglasses. You even had that stupid shirt with the palm trees on it.”

Grillby chuckled warmly as he recollected the improbable scene and how the first image the townsfolk had had of the pair had been that of Papyrus discovering his brother with shock, only to scold him for almost half an hour in the middle of the streets about how he had asked him to make an effort to look friendly and ‘blend in’ so they would not disturb the inhabitants from their daily lives and adapt to the local quietness because that was exactly what they had moved in for. If that wasn’t a perfect first impression.

“Talk about provocation. It was obvious how much you didn’t want to be here.”

Sans was laughing along, the same tone of nostalgia in his voice. “heh heh eh… good times. i kept gettin stares for a week and whenever they mentioned the event i’d pull out the sunglasses and a punchline. everybody was always askin where the glasses were comin from. nobody ever figured out i was literally just teleportin them.”

So that was how he did it. Magic trick up his sleeves, riiight. More like magic superpower unjustly accorded to a skilled conman with the tendency to make terrible jokes.

Then again, in retrospect, a lot of his pranks were twice as hilarious now that he knew how he had been doing them.

Part of him was now genuinely impressed and somewhat infuriated that nobody had ever found out that he could use some kind of teleportation, himself included. Now that he knew, some occurrences were just so obvious. How had he not found out earlier? Was denial really that strong an influence so it could bend perception to such extent?

As he reminisced his own memories, Sans eventually sighed. “i guess y’could say that’s the only good thing that came out of the accident… kinda. really wasn’t worth the effort though.” Seeing Grillby’s confused look, he immediately added: “don’t get me wrong, that’s a super cool power and i got used to having it probably a bit too much by now, so i’d totally have trouble adjustin to things if i lost it. but if it meant that could set things back to normal… i’d do it without any second thoughts.”

“You had an accident…?” the fire elemental asked in surprise in-between two bites. The sandwich really didn’t taste as bad as it looked, after all.

“yep. very bad one, at that.”

“Were there ever any good ones?”

Sans snorted. “true. unless you count That One With the Glasses.”

“...... You’re still forbidden from even looking at my cellar.” he glared coldly.

“come on, you and i both know that i was the one who saved it. i was innocent, this time! without me you would’ve all been doomed, by wine or by fire.”

Honestly, Grillby neither needed nor wanted a reminder.

“Could you remind me why I haven’t just banned you yet?”

“‘cause startin from the day i showed up your pub started getting thrice as much attention?”

He… legitimately did not have any counter argument to this. Sans did attract customers like a magnet, for some unexplainable reason. “... Seems valid.”