Chapter Text

Prologue

     You weren’t sure how long it had been since the last reset. Time had stopped making much sense a while back, so having it actually move forward for once was disorienting.

     Not that being underground helped much. It had been long enough for the underground to truly empty out at least. Even the flower had left at some point, Frisk must have finally convinced him to get out.

     You wonder how the people you once called family are doing now, are they happy? Do they miss you? Do they even remember you at this point? It was hard to care about the past when you couldn’t even be certain the next hour would happen, but The Player hadn’t shown themselves since the last time the barrier had been broken. Time was finally advancing; the loop was over.

     It didn’t really matter now did it? At least not to you. The game was over, the puppeteer had grown bored and left, so no one needed a narrator anymore. It left you close to how you remember frustration feeling, back when you could still feel on your own. That really was all there was to it, they had grown bored. You didn’t stop them, couldn’t. Not even your little trick at the end of the world had been enough to get them to leave.

     That had been the worst of the runs. Apparently, your world had grown stale, uninteresting. So like a child throwing a fit, they tore it apart, moving along a path of carnage, destroying everything you had once held dear. And as the underground grew emptier, desolate, you could feel it, the power, the LV.

     It had been dizzying, existing for once, no longer just the narrator, but an actor on the stage. You thought that maybe that was why you were still around, to fulfill some sort of great purpose. After all, there had to be a reason why they would decimate an entire species, right?

     Even if the LOVE was muffling the experience, it was still the first time you had actually felt anything in over a century. The underground would go empty, you would get more power, and then you would move on, having fulfilled your purpose. A pretty stupid thing to believe in hindsight, but who could blame you? It’s not like you had a choice to begin with. So you walked, and killed, and kept walking, being spurred along by an entity beyond your comprehension.

     But it would only lead to disappointment, there wasn’t any great purpose, no good reason for any of the deaths. You were just entertainment, your life and those of your loved ones just toys for them to play with. And they wanted to go back. Do it all over again just because they could. So you got rid of it all, the stage, the props, everything. But they wouldn’t leave.

     They were determined.

     And so were you.

     Maybe the deaths of all those monsters wouldn’t be in vain, you could make sure of it. Make sure that this time, there would be consequences. You could make sure they never got the “happy ending” they were so obsessed with.

     …

     It didn’t work.

     It had been silly, really, to think that a number like LV20 would be enough to enact any form of justice on a being that was quite literally playing with time.

     They got rid of your influence easily enough, literally erasing the consequences of their actions and leaving you with an uncomfortable amount of knowledge you couldn’t even begin to understand. What good does it do you to know that system_information_962 is found under %LOCALAPPDATA%/UNDERTALE when you don’t even know what “localappdata” means? The more you tried to understand, the less you felt like you were even real, so you stopped, resigning yourself to your role as a narrator to something that you understood less the more you learned about it.

     The resets kind of blur together after that, they never tried to commit genocide again, so maybe you did succeed in some way?

     And then it was over, at least you think it is. The concept of a last reset somehow feeling even less real than the idea of there having been a first one.

     Time doesn’t really make sense, does it?

     And so here you are, an echo of a person long gone, knowing too much for your own good yet having no role to play. Haunting a patch of golden flowers beneath a mountain no one lives in anymore. What reason there is to your continued existence is beyond you at this point, but apparently demons don’t get to rest in peace, so you will sit and wait, for them to come back, to slap a brand-new name onto you and have you spin the tale once again. Or maybe this time you will get to disappear for good, only time will tell.