Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: HUMANS and MONSTERS.
Without warning, the humans attacked, declaring total war.
The monsters fought valiantly, but could not prevail.
The humans imprisoned them in the caves beneath MT EBOTT behind an impenetrable BARRIER.
Not many years later...

MT EBOTT - 1XXX

"No, my child, I have spent all day preparing this food, I will not let you skip straight to desert."

"Aww, but mooooom," ASRIEL DREEMURR, crown prince of the Underground and destined savior of monsterkind, pouted with his fluffy cheeks in his hands, "I wanted snail stew tonight!"

TORIEL DREEMURR, his one and only mother and Queen of monsters, had to hitch her breath to resist snorting out of her nose with laughter. "My child, do I not make you snail stew almost every night? Perhaps it would do you well to try something else. Besides, your father and Chara also worked hard on it."

"Well," Asriel crossed his arms, "that's because it's stupid human food. Of course it takes forever to make."

"And it was made with love, Asriel!" The enormous paw of ASGORE DREEMURR, supreme ruler of all monsters and head gardener of New Home, draped itself over his son's head and almost completely enveloped it, all just to muss up the boy's ears and fur. "Besides..." he leaned in close, whispering conspiratorially "if you don't feel right with solid stuff going through your body, just burn it up with your fire magic before you swallow! It works just fine for me!"

"Oh!" Toriel exclaimed, looking at her own untouched plate with a bit of relief, "I did not think of that..."

"I can't believe you guys are scared of potatoes." Chara, second royal child and the second in line to monsterkind's throne, wiped their mouth and crossed their arms. "We spent the last three months growing these things, and when I first suggested it, all of you sure acted reeeeal eager about it. And now that the moment's here, none of you even want to give them a chance."

Toriel averted her eyes in shame. "You are right, my child. I apologize, I do not mean to disrespect your efforts and kindness." ("Or to lecture me about not trying them when you aren't either!" "Shush now, child.") "It is only that... well, consuming food that is not made of magic... we are not sure that it will... agree with us."

"Also, well..." Asgore shuddered a bit, looking at the sliced vegetables on his plates with distrust, "I cannot help but remember the last time I tried your human food."

Chara grimaced and glanced away. "I was... I was just a stupid kid, then. Plus, that was a whole recipe, which is easy to mess up. You and I grew these all on our own! I know they're not poisonous, and you know there's nothing mixed in."

"Well we did grow them in dirt, Chara. Are you sure that doesn't get mixed in somehow?"

"Come on, dad, all plants grow in dirt!"

"My experience with eating plants has gone very poorly in the past."

Chara huffed, pouting with frustration. "I... I'm sorry, I just... I guess I was too optimistic about this. I... I think I'm done, mom, is it OK if I go on a walk?"

Toriel frowned, but offered a slight smile despite the downcast expression that remained in her eyes. "Would you like some dessert before you go? I baked a pie for all of us to share, and it would be a shame if you did not enjoy it."

Chara let out a small breath of a laugh and shook their head. "Save me a slice for later, OK? I'll be back before any of you work up the nerve to try my potatoes ("No you won't!!! I'm gonna try them!!!" "Sure, Azzy.")

"Well, just be careful if you're going on your own, Chara." Asgore nodded.

"I will, father. And I won't do anything dangerous." Chara hopped down from their chair and walked to the sink, where they carefully washed both their hands and their favorite knife, which they slipped into their waistband. Before they could make it to the front door, though, they were interrupted by Asriel also jumping down from his chair, forcibly swallowing the better half of an entire potato in one unnecessarily-ambitious bite. 

"There, see! I'm not scared, and it even tasted kinda better than dirt!" Indeed it did. Though the underground was somewhat limited with regard to what human ingredients could be procured, Chara and Toriel had at the very least managed to scrimp together some salt to add a touch of flavor. 

Chara grinned, their dour mood almost instantly reversed by their brother's antics. "Told you it wouldn't kill you, Asriel. I mean, it won't kill you."

Asriel gulped, a function both of swallowing the rest of his mouthful and fear at Chara's suddenly ominous tone. "Uh, what do you mean by that, Chara?"

They rubbed their hands together deviously, flashing the poor goat with the scariest expression they could muster. "You'll see for yourself in a day or two!"

"H-hold on! Seriously, what does that mean, Chara!?"

"He he he! Good luck, little brother!" Without allowing time for any more discussion, Chara scurried from the room, dashing to the elevator that would deliver them out of New Home proper and into the capital at large, where poor Asriel would be helpless to find them. Normally, the pair were the next best thing to inseparable, but Chara had already gotten the idea of going off on a little adventure alone in their head when they were pouting about their food not being accepted, and now keeping their beleaguered brother guessing about the mysteries of the digestive system was yet more motivation. The prank probably came off as a touch meaner than it really was, but it would turn out fine- Chara would be back long before anything gross had time to happen, and then they could warn Asriel so he wouldn't think he was poisoned or something.

Meanwhile, the prince in question wasn't exactly in a full panic, but his eyes had a glint of fight-or-flight that couldn't be expressed when the danger that sent his hackles up was now a completely internal one.

"Now, do not worry, little one," Toriel said, scooping him up into her lap and patting his head, "Chara knew all about the effects of these 'potatoes,' and they would never poison us (intentionally.) I am sure you will be just fine, it will just be some... small side-effect of human food. Nothing to worry about."

"That's just what I was going to say, Pumpkin." Asgore nodded, though his lips were still pursed. His beard shifted as he squinted, focusing so much energy on his own reasoning skills that it seemed as though he was very literally chewing the possibilities. "Ah, but... do you have any idea what they were getting at?"

Toriel sighed. "We will have to ask them more seriously when they return."

Asriel, mostly calmed down, suddenly blinked as something much more important than his potential poisoning occurred to him. "Oh, hey! I ate the human food! Can I have a slice of pie?"

"Are you two ready?"

"yup."

"Y-yeah!"

"Good. Then we'll begin without further delay." 

Deep within the CORE, the facility that supplied the entirety of Mt Ebott with functionally limitless magical and electrical power, that same CORE's creator stood ready to make use of the bulk of its enormous generative capacity. Doctor W. D. Gaster, the Royal Scientist for King Asgore, stood at the controls of a machine of such complexity that no one in the entire world save his personal aides and himself could have understood even its base function, let alone manage its operations.

ENTRY NUMBER ONE - Breaking the Barrier by either force or dispelment is hopeless. Perhaps if the monster species were not so catastrophically reduced in number, by all our forces combined we could crack it, but with the state of affairs as it is, the idea of shattering it is a tasteless joke.

"core's runnin' at 13%. we've got a lotta slack." Sans' beady white pupils snapped rapidly from one readout on the screen in front of him to another. His constantly smiling expression rarely shifted, but at the moment a touch of anxiety could be detected where his jaws met, and his tone betrayed a touch less joviality than he was known for. Nonetheless, he moved with a youthful lightness, appearing behind his co-researcher without warning to scan her readouts as well before he instantaneously returned to his post.

"Good. The longer we let the machine run unsuccessfully, the more power it will draw out to no avail. We must expend all our efforts as quickly as possible if we hope for success. Aim for a maximum draw of 95%."

"The machine will draw power faster the more we power it. Do we r-really have time to finish the whole experiment before it drains that last 5% of excess capacity and starts c-cannibalizing its own power supply?" Like Sans, Alphys struggled to keep herself completely calm in the face of such a critical moment in their research. Unlike Sans, she couldn't claim to being particularly relaxed even at the best of times. Her tail swished from side to side, producing barely-visible lines of swept dust even in a scientific environment that otherwise had the appearance of perfect cleanliness.

ENTRY NUMBER TWO- Its durability is only matched by its complexity. These spells were not the brainchild of any one human, nor even of seven working in concert. They must only have collaborated on the Barrier's general shape and function and intentionally let their magic run wild, filling the shape as it would. It is a miracle their reckless actions led to any success at all- no, on the contrary, it is a calamity.

"We have no other choice, Doctor Alphys." While Gaster's two arms were crossed tightly along his chest, his only outward sign that he wasn't completely immune to his subordinates' fears, his additional hands were busier even than his skeletal assistant was. A dozen bony appendages floated about in his vicinity, their persistent presence an unavoidable hallmark of his signature magic, not to mention  his personal brand. A pair held a clipboard and pen in front of his face, jotting notes, while others feathered levers and dials at his master control panel, allowing him to take note of how his machine responded to the slightest commands. "Besides, although it is of course important that we should not let the Underground experience a blackout, it would be no great disaster if it did. We came here in the darkness, we can survive some minutes returned to it."

"I'm just worried," Alphys conceded, her forked tongue snaking through her teeth to aimlessly flick at scaly jaws, "If we can't get it to work using over 80% of the CORE's power, then w-what's next? If we intentionally shut out everyone's power, we can get, what, m-maybe n-ninety-six? Before the machine drains itself dry in five seconds."

ENTRY NUMBER FOUR- But I have a better idea. It is not only the sheer power of human souls which can break the barrier. No, the humans wanted to have the best of both worlds without the downsides of either. They left a 'backdoor opening' in the Barrier's design, one which allows humans to escape not through their own power, but using their souls as a 'key' of sorts.

"that's not all the power we've got. if a certain lizard wanted to pitch in some lightning magic, we could manage a few extra watts." 

"T-that's impossible, Sans! I could never output enough to..."

"She is correct, Sans. Alphys' magical power is weak enough that to add it to the CORE's production would be a waste of her energy- energy we sorely need focused on her performing her job."

"ah, it's just like you to shoot me down, doc. great men are always met with resistance when they're conducting science that nobody else can understand."

"Yes," Gaster agreed, "but it is alright. There is no harm in offering new ideas, even if they are poor."

Sans and Alphys shared a glance, Sans shrugging amusedly as Alphys gave him a bit of a sympathetic cringe.

ENTRY NUMBER FIVE- Only one human may pass through at a time, and only by claiming a monster soul- whether that is some sick trophy hunting requirement or the malignant will of the Barrier itself I cannot determine. What is clear is that this renders this method not only impossible, but impractical as well. If we had one human for each monster, we could claim seven souls scores of times over.

"what's the bug-out plan if things go haywire?"

"The specimen is much more important than the machine, unless the machine has already done its work, in which case the inverse is true. The experiment should be non-destructive to the specimen unless it's a complete success, so in the event that we encounter problems early on, prioritize retrieving the specimen at all costs. This should not be a problem, both you and I are uniquely suited to doing so, Sans."

"But using your magic to grab it w-won't work if the machine is sucking up all the magic in its area."

"If the machine is still absorbing magic, then the experiment has not failed. We must just assure that it isn't damaged after it completes its work."

ENTRY NUMBER SIX- However, the barrier requires no claim of the power of these countless human souls, only that it recognize those souls. In other words, a third solution arises. If one has no key, and one cannot kick down the door, one option remains: to trick the lock.

"Well, if the machine is working right, it'll absorb everything except physical matter. That means that if we leave the protective area while it's running, it might even s-siphon off our life force!" Alphys curled her tail around her chest as her sharp teeth ground together, loud enough for both of her fellow scientists to hear and pointedly ignore.

"On the contrary, Alphys, if the machine is working right and you leave the protective area, it will definitely siphon off your life force." His black eyes focused on one unmarked checkbox on his clipboard, going wide in concern. "Sans, have you changed the filters on the air conditioning unit?"

"yeup."

ENTRY NUMBER EIGHT- But we don't have one. Not even one. If we had, then we wouldn't be in this position. Without even a single human soul, we cannot gather the material that comprises it. We cannot examine it, understand it, replicate it. We must, without fail, find an alternative.

"In our test at 18% power, the machine was sluggish to stop. We all know how d-dangerous it is, so we should be sure we have a way to shut it off, right?"

"Indeed. I've reinforced our emergency stop mechanisms with additional redundancies, but in the case of a serious incident, we may need to shut off the CORE altogether. Stopping the experiment in an emergency will be your responsibility, as Sans and I will be preoccupied with preserving the materials. However, I know you tend towards acting with undue haste, and as such, I must instruct you do not initiate an emergency stop without my order, unless I am unconscious or otherwise incapacitated."

"Y-yes, doctor!"

"should turn out fine. you can flip the switches with a quick zap of lightning, so you can deal with it even quicker than the doc and me in an emergency."

ENTRY NUMBER ELEVEN- I T   M U S T   B E   T H E   P R I N C E P S .

"If you two are through with your chitchat, I'll be raising the CORE to a higher output. Any further distractions?"

"i'm good over here."

"S-same on my side, Doctor! D-do... do you think this is it?"

"If it isn't..." Gaster didn't feel the need to finish his response, simply pushing four levers up to their maximum positions with four hands, causing the entire superstructure they were standing in to begin shaking. 

Great vents deep beneath them began to slide open, allowing tidal waves of magma to flow directly into the CORE's geothermal generator and back out, the flow depositing a continuous supply of heat representing dozens of megawatts of useful power. Gaster had designed the CORE to drastically outmatch the Underground's power consumption, not only at the moment but even into the distant hypothetical future, and its usual state may as well have been a buzzing portable generator compared to its maximum capacity. Now, the facility hummed with potential energy, the power of untold electrical and magical force thrumming from floor to ceiling. The floor listed and shifted underneath the researchers like they'd suddenly begun floating on liquid, and the sheer excess of magical energy in the atmosphere was palpable without the input of any of the conventional senses.

ENTRY NUMBER FOURTEEN- If it is certain that even a long-dead human corpse still contains some parts of the soul, of which I am quite certain, then there can be no doubt that these parts can be isolated from the pesky physical matter. It is fortuitous that Unkyl never discarded the arm he took from that human, but I will need to find a way to extract its immaterial essence.

Alphys grit her teeth, finding it hard to control her own magic in this densely suffused environment. She felt like a vessel full of water dunked into a lake, trying to somehow keep herself from mingling with the water around her. Static electricity buzzed through her scales, limiting her movement. The column of protofeathers running up and down her back stood on end, uncomfortably splaying into the back of her lab coat. The rims of her glasses were spontaneously magnetized and she had to repeatedly press them back into the bridge of her nose lest they slip or shoot off and away, repelled by her scales' opposite charge. Despite the situation suddenly growing much more intense, most of her anxiety seemed to spiral off into the atmosphere along with the current that sparked away with each movement. It was do or die, and years of skipping schoolwork to make up the difference by acing tests had trained her to focus intently when the chips were down.

Sans, for his part, faced similar issues. He blinked patience out of his right eye, holding his own soul down by force as his magic, activating unprompted, threatened to send him floating listlessly into the air with no gravity at all. Alphys' inverse as always, Sans felt his nervousness spike as the moment of truth came closer and closer. He was here because he enjoyed science and wanted to give his empty skull some exercise from time to time, he'd never signed up for changing the future of monsterkind and personally risking his life. He was a pretty fragile guy, noncommittal, and this entire situation struck him as just altogether too serious. He waved his hand, banishing calcium deposits that were forming on the controls around him, aborting misfired bone attacks that could endanger the experiment or his own life and limb if he wasn't cautious.

As for the good doctor, he seemed unaffected by both the physical and psychological stressors that were bearing down on his two subordinates. Despite the pressure, both psychological and literal, that filled the room with its suffocating force, Gaster's expression remained neutral if a bit tense. White pupils swam lazily in black sclera, seemingly impassively regarding the complex readouts blinking underneath them. Regardless of his own mental fortitude, not even he was immune to the effects of the dense magic that filled the entire environment, and purple wisps ran like spiderwebs between the holes in his skeletal extra hands.

ENTRY NUMBER FIFTEEN- It is presently impossible to distinguish what makes up the "soul matter" accepted by the Barrier from a human's latent magic, emotions, life force, or any of a number of other real or imagined aspects of their non-physical nature. In short, we cannot design any form of extractor to precisely remove what we need from the extra useless pieces. The solution is simple; we'll take everything that isn't nailed down.

"The time is now."

"hold onto your butts."

"J-just do it!"

The air left the room.

The magic left the room.

The sound left the room.

The electricity left the room.

The light left the room.

The light left the room.

The light left the room.

ENTRY NUMBER SIXTEEN- At last, a success. I have modified my extractor to draw forth all material that is not physical matter. Be it magic, emotion, light, sound, energy, all extant massless substances will be separated from mass and held in suspension. Once they are free from the physical material that holds them together, I may take my time separating and examining them one by one at my leisure. Regardless of what precisely it is that composes a human SOUL, its remnants will be mine to examine. It may take years, but I have nothing but time. I am very, very excited for what this next experiment will reveal.

"Hey, wizard!"

"Your magicsty!"

Chara waved down Madjick, the royal magician, from where he erratically floated outside of the CORE. The disarmed spellcaster bounced through the air to land by Chara's side, telekinetically tipping its hat.

"Hey, could you take me over to the CORE? I wanna say hi to the eggheads." Chara paused for a moment before blinking. "Please." With Madjick, one could never forget the magic word.

The wizard looked conflicted. "Sage Gaster is performing an important ritual with his apprentices. The uninitiated should not be allowed passage."

"Oh come on, master, with your teachings, I'm perfectly prepared to see something cool like that." Chara's tongue was wedged firmly in their cheek as they used the respectful term that Madjick preferred. They'd spent hours training in magic with him, the same they had with the other Dreemurrs, and technically speaking were his apprentice. Of course, magic didn't come easily to a human, and it seemed Chara's talents were limited even by human standards. Still, they knew the words, and they could conjure a few sparkles from time to time.

"Oh, alright. The sage won't be happy, but if it's a royal decree..."

"Thank you!" Chara hopped into the air, landing on a cushion of air telekinetically conjured by Madjick rather than the ground.

"You're welcome. Open sesame!" With a wave of magical power, one of the CORE's outer walls temporarily vanished, producing a hole through which the wizard floated Chara. "Fare you well, my apprentice (and boss!)"

"Bibbity-boppity bye, Madjick!" Chara waved as they quickly descended into the CORE, leaving the hole to close behind them. They could feel the heavy thrum of energy running through every surface of the entire superstructure, and the lava deep below roiled beneath them, shaking the floor like a ship's hull in a storm. "Sheesh... Doctor Gaster really must be doing something big today... I wanna see!" They picked up the pace, hollow echoes of their rapid footfalls reverberating through the metal halls. They rapidly made their way through the structure heading for its center- the CORE's core. The atmosphere grew stranger as they grew closer, the racket produced by the power plant at full blast not growing quieter, but instead more muffled, more warped. 

Finally, they reached the door into Gaster's personal lab, where he could be found most often. It was guarded by a keypad, but they'd been observant enough to pick up on the code when Gaster had let them in for previous tours, and they entered the 12 digits without even paying much attention.

"What's up, doooooooc-" 

The scientists didn't even notice Chara's entry. How could they, with the situation they had on their hands? The entire space behind the protective barrier had vanished like it was completely evicted from reality. Where it had been, only a hole remained, a gap in space of such impenetrable darkness that it seemed to swallow up the light even outside of its own encroaching bulk.

No, it didn't seem to.

"H-h-how it this possible!? From the experiment area I'm getting n-no magic, no sound, no e-electricity, but-"

"The photon readings aren't zero! They're negative! How!? And there's a substantial force of suction, as though we were creating a vacuum, but the extractor doesn't absorb anything with mass, so it shouldn't have any effect on the air pressure!"

"the support glass ain't that strong. if the pressure is goin' down in there, it'll crack before long, and then we're all boned. shut it all down, doc!"

"But-!" For once, Gaster's voice wavered, not only with his bewilderment at the absurd scene playing out before him, but with uncertainty with regard to his own decision. "The results, here, a negative-light phenomena, this is astonishing! More importantly, an emergency stop without securing any material we've already extracted-"

"i can't secure anything, doc! my magic doesn't reach in there, it's all sucked up instantly."

"My only s-sensors that still work are the ones out here, everything inside the chamber is totally junk! D-d-doctor! We have to stop!"

Gaster focused on his own readings, mumbling with utter astonishment. "The removal of light that seems to not be present at all... is this a function of some dormant human magic we've unknowingly unleashed? Is this the sort of power present in only a tiny fraction of their SOUL? If we could only access this, apply this-"

"hey, is it just me, or is it gettin' kinda... ah... tiring in here?"

"T-tiring?" Alphys' eyes snapped open with immediate concern. "Sans? What does that mean?"

Sans' teeth were gritted in a lopsided smile, one of his sockets half-lidded while the other managed to keep itself fully open. "i mean, you guys feel that, don't you? the way everything's all... fallin'." He took a slight stumble forwards, the base of his ribcage pressing against his control panel.

Alphys felt a bolt of panic run down her spine. Sans was usually the most observant and perceptive of all of them, but he was only even half-coherent. Something was going very wrong, not the least of which was- she did feel it too. Not whatever he meant about being tired, but there was a force pulling her towards her control panel- no, towards the experiment past the controls. If the suction phenomena was the result of a vacuum, it couldn't possibly affect them past the sealed glass, which meant it was something more than that. Involuntarily, one of her claws landed on her controls as though it had fallen down into them rather than ahead. The moment they made contact with the metal, Alphys spotted a flash of lightning rush forth through her scales, into the panel, and then out through the safety glass into the black void that was the experiment.

"It's magic!" Alphys screamed, snapping both Sans and Gaster out of their respective reveries. "It's drawing in Sans' telekinetic magic! It acts like suction or gravity, but really it's just Sans' magic being pulled from him and into the extractor! It's stronger than we calculated, we have to stop it now!" 

"ah hell, she's right," Sans choked, shaking his head. "i got less stamina than you two, havin' it take my magic's takin' a lot out of me."

"Damn! Damn, damn! Damn! Stop the experiment, Alphys!"

"DONE!" Alphys had been prepared to run a harsh jolt of lightning through a certain fuse in the controls, immediately cooking it and cutting off all power in a split second. However, she could tell that her magic, too, was being quickly drawn into the extractor, and she wasn't confident as to her ability to direct it at any point that wasn't "directly towards the experiment." She had an alternate option, though. A lever on her control panel served a different purpose than the others- inside the panel, the lever was actually a blade, one designed such to physically slice a critical bundle of wires that fed power to the extractor's components. The telekinetic force pushing her towards the window made grabbing the lever easy, but pulling it in the opposite direction proved a nigh-Herculean task, her foot claws gripping her control panel and her tail pushing against it as she yanked in the opposite direction. She was able to drag the blade to the point that it was supposed to cut, but the added resistance made the feat even more difficult as Sans staggered from the increased draw on his own powers.

"I've- a-almost got it-"

All four heads in the room suddenly snapped to one point as a terrible thud rang out, followed instantly by a yet-more-terrible sound of cracks radiating through reinforced glass. At the very center of the protective barrier keeping the scientists from the brunt of the terrible catastrophe they'd somehow managed to cause, piercing straight through the barrier's reinforced glass, was a suspiciously well-maintained and well-used dagger.

"Oh, shit," Chara said, glancing down to their hip, "it pulled out my knife."

Alphys' jaw gaped. Sans' sockets went wide as saucers and black as the void that was probably about to kill them. 

"PRINCEPS CHARA!?! WHY ARE YOU HERE!?"

"I just wanted to see the-"

The glass shattered. All its shards hurtled into the dark, along with Chara's dagger. In spite of all logical reasoning, a terrible roaring noise tore through the shadows, nearly deafening everyone in attendance.

Sans grit his teeth and clenched his fists until the knuckles audibly ground together. His eye flashed with PATIENCE.

The roaring stopped. The suction stopped. The blaring of alarms, the panic of his fellows, the total chaos that consumed the lab stopped dead. For a moment, Sans began to catch his breath.

"nah. there's no time."

He was already exhausted. Beyond exhausted. He could barely lift his arms and legs to move, let alone afford to dilly-dally in stopped time, a magical ability that drained his energy quite expeditiously even at the best of times. 

Just walking to the other side of the room felt like hiking up a mountain. He trudged, step after step, through mud, his mind desperately keeping hold of magic that his body just as desperately wanted to let loose. With the extractor functionally inactive with time ground to a halt, it was no longer drawing away Sans' magic, but what it had already taken weighed on him like a pile of junk on his head. He glanced around the room. Right now, the barrier had broken, meaning everyone was almost certainly about to be dragged into the extractor or whatever catastrophic chain reaction they'd accidentally created in its place. In the room was not only all three Royal Scientists (and with them, monsterkind's only hope of escaping from Mt Ebott), but also the King and Queen's kid. Everybody dying was for sure no good. So, what were his options?

Well, he could kill himself.

"eh. too heavy."

More importantly, even if it was his power that was currently pulling everyone in towards the center of the room involuntarily, the extractor was now loose, and it'd draw the literal souls from everyone even if it wasn't physically pulling them in. It was only a matter of time before it cannibalized its own power source and shut itself off, but that wasn't enough time. 

Well, he could try to run away, but even if he had enough time to trudge out of the range of the monster they'd let loose, he'd only be saving himself, the least useful person in the whole room, and that was a big if to begin with. 

So OK, what else. Alphys was currently trying to cut off the power. Good idea, he could do that. If he was in his best condition, he'd just send bones through every stupid surface in this lab and fry everything, but that wasn't an option in his currently weakened state. Maybe one directed bone attack at one set of cables? No, easier, he'd just help Alphys pull the lever. Good. There's a plan.

"and i don't die in it."

He hobbled his way over to the doorway where he stood next to Chara, pressing one shoulder behind the door to brace himself. Alphys was also desperately clawing her controls to begin with, so she was holding herself in place, but the real problem was Gaster and Chara, who were both just standing around like idiots waiting to get sucked into this... black hole? He'd have to catch them. Man, with all the magic he was gonna have to use, he might wind up dying just from exertion. Well, whatever.

"it's go, time."

The instant the glass broke, Sans appeared just behind Chara, peeking out through the lab's doorway, sweating like a dog through his skull. He reached out with one trembling hand, fighting desperately with the extractor for control of his magic, for just a drop of what he had left in the last few seconds before he was completely drained. The other three felt supernatural tugs on their bodies even as a similar but much greater force dragged them in the other direction. Alphys got the memo immediately, even as light, sound, and life drained from the room. She snapped her jaws together, fangs grinding as she pulled at her lever with her entire body. Meanwhile, Chara and Gaster completely lost their footing, falling silently towards the center of the cataclysm. Gaster's extra floating hands, bereft of magic to control them, fell in first with no resistance, but Sans' grip held the man himself from following them, if only for a moment.

"ah, crud," Sans breathed, grinning deliriously, "i can't hold ya all."

All at once, the events reached their conclusion. Sans' blue eye snapped back to black and empty, Alphys dragged her lever-blade through a critical bundle of wires, and both the royal child and royal scientist slipped silently into the dark. 

Sans fluttered back to consciousness. He could tell he was sitting (his second favourite position to be in) by the fact that the first thing his eyes met as his white pupils filled their sockets again was the tips of his shoes laid out in front of him.

"eh?"

The second thing they met was Alphys, squeezing him in a hug tight enough to hurt, which was impressive given her usually wimpy upper body strength.

"Sans! You're OK! You saved me!" She let out a sound, a terrible moan like she'd been stabbed in a lung. "Y-you saved m-me... instead of..."

"you were the one who could stop the machine. had to be you." Sans was barely conscious, but those last few split-seconds were still flashing through his mind. "the doc, the kid... what..."

"Look," Alphys breathed out in total despair, one clawed finger pointing back into the lab. 

The extractor had stopped, the CORE was silent, and the disaster had stopped, but rather than the ruins of their lab (and, Sans had feared, a human corpse covered in Gaster's dust,) all that was visible were plumes of impenetrable black smoke, seemingly flowing freely from the wall like some sort of pipe had been burst and was releasing its horrible contents into the atmosphere. There was no sign of either of the others, though it would be completely impossible to spot them within that maelstrom.

"so, are they...?"

"I don't know. I can't even get into the smoke. It's permeable enough, but when I try to go in, I just get turned around and pushed back out, and when I test it with inanimate objects, they just go in and in and in like it's some kind of bottomless pit in there."

"huh."

"Sans... we're both going to get executed."

"... yeah."

Somewhere deep within the dark, in a quiet castle overlooking an empty town, something stirred. 

The steward of the dark glanced skyward as his little kingdom was invaded by a flash of light.

"Finally." His voice wavered with wonder, claws tearing thoughtlessly into his cloak, "the heroes are here." 

Chapter Text

Falling.

Falling again.

Falling into a pit where darkness stretched out infinitely in every direction, where the only way to know when you'd hit the ground was to notice that you weren't alive anymore.

It felt like being born.

Born again.

"Nngh..."

Chara rose from the ground with a smoothness that even surprised themselves. They'd been unconscious, though it was hard to guess for how long. They'd been falling, experiencing the gut-churning sensation of acceleration while occasionally getting glances of a similarly-hurtling Doctor Gaster, and then they woke up, laying on the floor with a brutal soreness in their arm, shoulder, hip, ankle. 

Floor?

Yes, a floor. Metal, tile. Smoothly segmented, flawlessly clean except for a puddle of drool under where Chara's lips and chin had been lying. They wiped their face. No blood. 

"Weird."

They'd fallen a long way before, but the trip from the surface to the Underground hadn't been half this long, and at the time they'd fallen into a cushion of soft dirt and grass, and soon after been treated for a number of broken bones and a serious concussion by Toriel's magic. This time, they landed on solid metal, apparently on their right side, and yet they felt- well, not good, but certainly not dead, and all their limbs seemed to be in working order. All said, they were feeling better than when they first fell into Ebott, inexplicably, though granted they'd been a little kid, then. Maybe they'd just toughened up in the past several years. 

The thought made Chara smile, despite the pain.

"I wasn't wearing this before." Chara blinked, staring at their hand. They'd noticed it had an odd feeling about it, but it took actually looking to realize that they suddenly had a glove on. Examination of that hand's twin confirmed they actually had a pair of gloves on. Brown leather gloves that went up halfway to the elbow, gauntlet-style. Following that line up the arm, they realized their whole outfit had changed, and was seemingly now primarily drab brown leather. Some sort of (thankfully not leather) brown cloth made up sleeves that emerged from underneath a brown leather jerkin. Down below, they wore brown pants and heeled jackboots with a folded over cuff at the top that made them look a bit like a pirate. Investigation of a weight behind their neck uncovered what was probably some sort of hood to be thrown over their head, which at the moment went unused under their hair. 

Hey, their hair! Shaking their head to move their bangs in front of their eyes, Chara startled to see that it had changed too. It was hard to tell, since it was dark here (wherever this was?) but there was enough light to be sure, their normally-brown hair was totally jet black, or perhaps a very dark purple? Hell, if their appearance had changed this drastically, Chara couldn't help but wonder if they were still in the same body at all. Had they been transformed somehow?

"Not being a human would be good," they quipped to the still air, but there wasn't any good way to tell. It wasn't like their was a mirror around. Failing that, something polished to a mirror sheen might do the trick. "Oh!"

Chara's gaze dropped to their waist, where they usually kept their trusty knife. A moment before it occurred to them that their knife had actually been sucked out into some sort of singularity, they had time to notice that while their normal knife wasn't there, they actually had a long sheath dangling from the left side of their belt. Whatever was down there, it was no normal knife, the blade looked to be probably 18 or 20 inches. The hilt fit into their hand like they'd been born holding it, and they drew it with such silken smoothness that they would have guessed they were calling on hundreds of hours of muscle memory. 

Oh, and what a beautiful blade it was. It was one-bladed and slightly curved, much like their own dagger, but with its length it would be better referred to as a machete or falchion. Despite its length, it was remarkably light, so much so that Chara might have worried they'd risk overswinging it and cutting themselves were it not for the practiced ease with which they were able to flit it through the air.

"Wow. This is good."

As per their hopes, it was polished to a mirror sheen, though its metallic color was interrupted by a red streak of Something that ran from the hilt all the way along its length to the tip of the blade. Regardless, it still functioned as a mirror, and a much more effective one than their actual knife would have been. They raised it in front of their face.

Black hair, and even paler skin than before, sure, but those rosy cheeks, those laser-focused red eyes, that winning smile.

"Despite everything, it's still me, Chara." :)

The blade slid into its sheath as though it was magnetized. It barely made a sound. 

"I bet Asriel could come up with a really cool name for this sword... anyway, where the heck is Gaster?"

It was a good question. 

"Where the heck am I?"

That one was even better, though.

This environment was completely inexplicable. Chara was standing on some sort of bridge, walkway, or perhaps pillar in a seemingly infinite sea of darkness. The area was dark, though their immediate vicinity was lit in a soft light as though they were under some sort of very dim spotlight, or perhaps as though they themselves were radiating some kind of glow. It lit up enough of the space to tell that they could navigate at least a bit further ahead of them, but to the left, right, and behind them, the metal tiles ended abruptly, dropping off into the abyss.

"Well, at least I won't get lost."

Cautiously, and nursing a bit of a limp on their right side, Chara stepped forward. It took a few strides for them to be sure, but yes, the further they walked, the further the light reached, so they didn't have to wander blindly off into the dark and risk falling into yet another bottomless pit. Another change in outfit out of this boring, colorless ensemble might be nice, but the sword was really cool, and they were already sore enough from the first drop, so they preferred to not slip and fall to oblivion. 

As they walked forward, the small area that they could see dutifully followed along, the path behind them disappearing as more and more identical tiles became visible ahead. Chara's gaze wandered back and forth. No sky, neither the stars that barely still twinkled in their memories of the surface nor the stalactites and sparkling gems that hung high above the Underground. The entire space, up, down, left, right, forward, and back, was nothing but a completely impenetrable abyss too deep and dark to distinguish any detail, nor even if there were details to spot. For all Chara knew, this path they were on could end two feet ahead of where the light currently allowed them to see, and this single pillar was all that existed in this entire... place? Dimension? Was all this inside Gaster's super terrible experiment? Maybe he'd been trying to invent a new pocket dimension to help relieve space in a place as cramped as Mt Ebott. If that was the case, it totally sucked. It was dark and hard and empty, and it replaced your cool striped shirt with something an isekai protagonist would wear. In all 365 degrees, as far as the eye could see, there was absolutely nothing to-

"Oh wait nevermind."

Chara's eyes narrowed as they focused on a small spot of light, down and off to their left. It was just a pitiful little blue glow, but it was definitely there, and not just a hallucination spawned by Chara's light-starved optic nerve. When they squinted, they could just barely make out the shape of a few small buildings and one larger one. Considering how tiny they looked, assuming those were full-size houses, it was probably miles away (and not perfectly in the direction they were travelling now,) but hey, it was something, right? Better yet, if Gaster wasn't dead, he'd probably also be heading that way, so maybe they could reunite and maybe he'd be able to fix this mess that he'd caused. 

There was something else, too. The source of that light. At first, it just seemed like it was a consistent radiance with no clear starting point, but that wasn't quite right. The light subtly shifted, throbbed with a continuous beat, like a pulse. Chara, startled, clasped their hand to their chest. Through two layers of cloth, it was hard to tell, so they moved to their carotid next. Yeah. Not just like a pulse. The light thrummed in time to their heartbeat. As they stared in total bewilderment, they felt their eyes dilate, not adjusting to the darkness, but as though they were staring into something intensely bright. Feeling an inexplicable instinct to avert their gaze, they blinked eyes that were now watering with irritation.

In the split second their eyes had been closed, that tiny little living light had exploded like an instant sunrise. More like a sun birth, the entire universe leaping into existence like God had commanded “let there be light.” That little flickering flame had become an incomprehensibly massive towering pillar of ever-shifting colors from which the whole world seemed to spring. Far off in the distance, paling next to the first, was a second, similar but much less grand pillar. 

Even more exciting, though, where moments ago there had only been darkness, now the entire space all around them was lit up, revealing a vista they could hardly have imagined a moment ago. The metal walkway they stood on stretched far off into the distance, but countless others of the same type filled the sky all around them, turning at right angles not only left and right, but sometimes straight up or down. Colossal machines of indeterminate purpose, larger than all of New Home, hung in the air like monoliths suspended only by impossibly thin cables that seemed to stretch upwards infinitely. Even the bridge (it was clear now that it was a bridge after all) that Chara was currently standing on had more “routes” than they’d realize, paths dropping right off the side onto other platforms far below, more bridges useful only to a spider or perhaps a snail, though it’d probably take the latter its entire lifetime to make the trip. 

This was annoying, though. With the addition of light, it was clear to see that the pathway they were on didn’t lead anywhere near the little town they were headed to, and additionally that none of these bridges seemed to have any stairs, elevators, or even slides. The only way to adjust your vertical position was to survive a sheer drop of hundreds or even thousands of feet, or to scale a completely smooth metal wall just as high. Unless they wanted to test their luck with another extremely lethal-looking drop, Chara had no way to get down. 

“Oh, but that guy does.” 

Chara’s mood instantly brightened as they noticed a tall, dark figure on a somewhat nearby bridge, down and off to the right. It was too far to make out any clear detail, probably half a mile or more away, but that had to be him, right? A pale head atop a jet black body, awkwardly shuffling around the pathway, accompanied by tiny, barely distinguishable white spots that were probably his disembodied hands crawling all about the pathway. 

“I mean, it’s gotta be him. Hey! HEY! HEEEYYY!!! DOCTOR GASTER!!!”

It took him a moment to perk up, maybe because of the speed of sound or something, but he heard. He glanced around, evidently making some sound, but not enough. At this distance, Chara couldn’t hear a damn thing. 

“HEY, IDIOT! PUT SOME EFFORT IN! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!!!” 

He took a step back, and Chara noted a barely discernible cock of his head. They sniggered. If he couldn’t tell before, Chara was the only one in the Underground with the nerve to call that stuck-up nerd an idiot, so they were now identified. He looked more closely in their direction, and Chara waved (a middle finger, not that he was likely to be able to tell,) but he didn’t wave back. 

“HELLO!? PRINCEPS CHARA!? HOLD ON ONE MOMENT!” 

Now it was Chara’s turn to twist their head in confusion. It was fair enough that he didn’t recognize them at first, given they were wearing a totally different outfit than usual, but he’d figured it out by now, so what was he on about? 

Chara watched in quiet bewilderment as for several minutes he sent out four of his floating hands flying off to various distances from him. Finally, he started hollering again. 

“ONE! I HAVE SENT MY HANDS OUT TO VARIOUS POSITIONS SEPARATED FROM MYSELF AND EACH OTHER BY ONE HUNDRED METERS!” 

“TWO! I AM CURRENTLY USING MY HANDS AS PORTALS TO PROJECT MY VOICE FROM!” 

“THREE! I HAVE NUMBERED EACH OF THEM ONE THROUGH FOUR, AND I HAVE THUS FAR ANNOUNCED FROM WHICH ONE I AM SPEAKING!” 

“FOUR! JUDGING BY THE VOLUME, ANGLE, AND TRAVEL TIME OF MY VOICE FROM EACH OF THE RESPECTIVE PORTALS, WE CAN TRIANGULATE OUR POSITIONS WITH RESPECT TO ONE ANOTHER!” 

“ONE! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE PRINCIPLES OF SOUND’S PROLIFERATION THROUGH AIR? IF NOT, I MAY BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN!” 

“Oh, great, Doctor Supergenius can’t see yet.” That explained the awkward shuffling around and him using his hands like a blind man’s cane. In fact, it seemed like he might be able to see even less than Chara could. “I CAN JUST SEE, IDIOT! HOW DID YOU THINK I SPOTTED YOU TO START CALLING!? JUST SEND ONE OF YOUR HANDS TOWARD WHERE YOU HEAR MY VOICE, YOU CAN DO YOUR PORTAL THING TO CLIMB OVER!” 

All four of Gaster’s floating hands sank, seemingly sagging in disappointment that he’d wasted the effort at setting up his little communication system. (Not to mention wasting that last little bit of condescension. Hah!) 

“… UNDERSTOOD! WHAT WOULD YOU ESTIMATE OUR DISTANCE TO BE?” 

“Uh, ABOUT HALF A MILE, MAYBE TWO THIRDS?” 

“IN METRIC YOU- NO, NEVERMIND, I CAN CONVERT! ZERO POINT EIGHT FIVE TO ONE POINT SIX TWO KILOMETERS!” 

“Oh, like you needed to convert, you GIANT NERD! JUST SEND THE HAND!” 

Chara was already sick and sore-throated from yelling, which wasn’t helped by needing to repeatedly yell “UP,” “DOWN,” “LEFT,” “RIGHT,” “NO, YOUR RIGHT!” as Gaster’s hand fell off track on its long floating trek up to Chara’s position. It made it, though, at the very least quicker than a normal person’s walking pace, at which point Chara grabbed its thumb, announcing its arrival. 

At that moment, the vacant hole in the right hand’s center sparked to life, revealing the view behind its paired lefty back on the platform where Gaster and all its siblings waited. Magically, almost grotesquely, the hole in its palm expanded along with the palm itself, until its size was large enough for Gaster to fumble his way through, followed by ten other hands. 

“Princeps, you’re here?” 

“Yeah, Doc, I’m here. Gosh, you can’t even see me right now?” 

“Of course not, I can’t even tell the difference between my eyes being open or closed, how do you see me? One moment, hold that thought. Left six, return.” He snapped his fingers (on the hand attached to his actual right arm, if you were curious) and the lone hand left on his previous bridge began its lonely journey to rejoin the others on their new position, unable to portal through due to being the portal entrance itself. 

Now that he was closer, Chara noted that Gaster’s outfit had changed too, though not in color. Whereas his laboratory gear normally consisted of a long, high-collared coat that reminded Chara of frightening bedtime tales of blood-sucking night-dwellers, he now wore something far more frightening; he was dressed to the nines in a three-piece tuxedo, almost all black, the spitting image of a human. Worse, a rich and powerful one. Chara’s leather gloves subtly whined as they clenched their fists, their breath hitching for a moment. 

“It’s fortuitous you weren’t further away. Not only would sound struggle to travel much further, but maintaining control of my hands, let alone an open portal, takes a great deal of magical energy with such a gap. At twice the distance, we may have been wandering near-indefinitely. How is it that you can see?” 

“I found a trick, I guess. C’mere, kneel down, let me point your face.” 

“Alright?” The doctor complied, dropping to both knees and folding them underneath him.

Chara grabbed his cheeks and directed them directly at the enormous pillar of… light? It looked, somehow, like it was darker than the areas illuminated by its radiance. “You were born on the surface, right? So you know how it feels to look into the sun. Scan your eyes until they find something that hurts, and then just keep staring until you have to blink.” 

“What? I… ah, I think I’ve found what you mean. What an odd sensation to- Angel’s light!?” 

He raised to his feet so quickly that he almost knocked Chara onto their ass, glancing around at all the sights that had stunned Chara not long ago, and with no less wonder.

“Unbelievable. This space is far more cavernous than I had imagined. And these walkways, these machines, the scale is unbelievable. Just this space in which we now stand dwarfs the entire Underground! And that pillar, the sheer energy it would require to produce such a thing…” 

He trailed off. Chara wasn’t a science geek, and they weren’t up to date with Gaster’s current research, but it was easy to guess what he was thinking about. There was only one thing that people trapped behind the Barrier could ever think about if they discovered a source of enormous power. Could that thing break the Barrier?

”Hold it a second before you start writing up new hypothesises-“ 

“Hypotheses-“ 

“Whatever! Considering you couldn’t even see a second ago, it seems like you probably don’t have a plan ready to get us back home-“ 

“With my notes, my equipment, perhaps I could begin to formulate some concept as to where we are at all, from whence I could begin to develop some sort of strategy to return to the Underground, but for now I-“ 

“SHUT UP??? I’M TALKING???” Chara raised their arms in an aggressive shrug, grin twisted in frustration. 

“Ahem. As was I, but what is it you need to say, your highness?” 

”That there’s a lead, idiot!” They pointed down at the base of the pillar. It was harder to make out now, what with that tremendous roiling beam of energy emerging from right behind it, but the shape of the castle and its town were still distinguishable. 

“Ah! Wonderful!” Gaster grinned. “A door! In magical symbology, doors are almost invariably associated with exit or escape. If anywhere will lead us out, it’s there.” 

What??? What??? What??? 

“A DOOR??? It’s a TOWN, genius, what do you mean a DOOR???” 

Gaster tapped one gloved finger against Chara’s cheekbone and moved their head one half-degree to the right where they spotted, indeed, a gigantic set of double doors, larger than most of the town’s buildings. 

“Oh, whoops. Sorry.” 

“It is quite alright. It looks to be about ten kilometers away.” He offhandedly opened a button on his coat as Left Six returned, slipping inside to rest or something. “We should be able to make that distance in good time. We should get moving.” 

“Agreed.” Chara nodded. 

Indeed, they did make good time. Gaster’s hands didn’t have to fly quite as far to move from one walkway to another now, since they could clearly see and travel to adjoining ones, and thanks to the ubiquity and size of the things, they never had to portal over a gap larger than 200 meters at a time. As they travelled, Gaster hypothesized that his lack of vision compared to Chara was a consequence of him having appeared or landed in a position where one of the vertical walkways coincidentally blocked his vision of the position of that grand pillar, and that sounded like a fine enough theory to Chara.

The trip wasn’t completely uneventful, though, and nor was it completely solitary. 

When they were less than three kilometers away from their destination, they heard a sound like the screech of rubber on metal, both immediately snapping to track the source of the sound. 

Not far, on one of those uselessly steep vertical “walkways,” an impossible shape sped by. Something- no, someone- was riding a flaming bike directly along the vertical surface, leaping from one walkway to another and from horizontal to vertical pathways with ease. It even did some super cool 360° tailwhips while it flew through the air. Once, it even managed a 720° tailwhip, though it landed unsteadily and almost fell over. Whatever the rider was, it was small, round, and blue, but possessed of a roughly humanoid body construction. 

“Identify yourself!” Gaster called out. 

“Are you monster or human!?” Chara followed, drawing their new sword to point it at the stranger. 

“What?” Gaster boggled, distracted from the important matter at hand for a moment. “Look at the size and shape of it, of course it must be a monster!” 

“Wh- I- whatever! Just slow down and show yourself, whoever and whatever you are!”

“Ho ho ho!” it responded with a voice beaming with jovial merriment, “you don’t know widdle owl me? Then you must not know the legend! Engrain this in your eyeholes now, heroes! For my pointy head, my round body, and my sick tricks, they all belong to…” he bounced in his seat, hurling himself and his bike into the air and beginning to go for a truly legendary 1080° triple tailspin- “the bad guy!” 

Chara boggled, almost dropping their sword as they reached out in bewilderment. “Wait, you idiot, there is no more platform ahead of you! You’re gonna-“ 

He fell. Having accidentally hopped right off the path with no nearby bridges to land on, the ‘bad guy’ hurtled off down towards oblivion with a flaming trail behind him, in the process inventing a tailspin with a number of degrees that would perhaps never be tallied by man or monster. 

“NYO HO HOOOOOOOOOOOO-“ he cried as he fell down into the darkness and out of sight. 

“Well.” Gaster said. 

“Yeah, OK. Let’s just go to town.” 

“Seconded.” 

Several minutes later, after they’d made a great deal of further distance- they were caught by a booming sound echoing from the depths - BOoOoOoOoOoOoOIiIiIiIiIiIing…

The two of them quite pointedly refrained from discussing it as they finally closed the gap between themselves and the town at the pillar’s base. As they got closer, the ground beneath them changed from flawlessly clean metal plates to dirty ones, and then simply to dirt, then grass, then a verdant garden much like King Asgore’s, full of vibrant flowers of many colors. 

Most of them, Chara couldn’t help but notice, were a very specific sort of golden flower, one which filled them with… mixed memories. Was it possible that this place was somehow actually on the surface? 

The town was quiet and seemingly empty. The place was clean and well-tended, the gardens in particular were in perfectly straight lines, completely free of weeds, and precisely separated from the path. Chara and Asgore took care to maintain New Home’s garden, but even Chara had to admit this work trumped theirs. 

The pair of them cautiously made their way through the silent town, Chara’s hand on the hilt of their blade. Gaster seemed less prepared for battle, and indeed substantially worn out; he’d pushed his magic to the limit teleporting them across a total of over ten kilometers, and he was skipping certain tricks he may otherwise have used to make sure he noticed any potential enemies before they noticed him. 

The pair froze, both suddenly noticing a noise coming from somewhere further ahead, near the front of the castle. It was humming, they realized as they listened closer, and a cheery little tune it was indeed. As they quietly approached, they noticed the source of the sound. 

A someone knelt in the dirt in a circular patch of garden enclosed by a raised brick wall in the center of the path. Their clothes were completely stained with dirt, as were their hands, which were wrapped completely in cloth bandages. He seemed completely absorbed in his little gardening endeavor, to the point that he startled when  Chara cleared their throat. 

He jumped rapidly to his feet, quickly enough that the revelation of his full height was frightening in and of itself- he was taller than Gaster, almost Toriel’s size. 

“Howdy!” he said, shaking his head as if to throw off his own surprise. “The heroes! How the heck did you make it through the Outside so quickly?” 

Despite facing them, not much about his appearance was revealed- a hood was tightly wrapped around his head, and between that, the rest of his loose, flowing clothes, and the wraps around his hands, not an inch of his skin was showing. His general shape and the sound of his voice made it pretty likely that he was indeed a “he,” at least. 

“The doc used his magic to-“ 

“Hold on. You are now the second to identify us as ‘heroes’ since we’ve arrived (“I was also curious about that”) and I disapprove of being left in the dark.” 

“Hee hee hee!” He covered his mouth. “Sorry, sir, that’s my bad. I’ve been a terrible host so far, it’s just that your choice of words…” he shook his head. “Anyway! I can’t just leave you two hanging! The short version is that you were destined to come here. The PROPHECY talks all about it.” 

Gaster squinted. “I don’t believe in prophecies.” 

“Well…” the odd person replied, scratching their head, “I think it’ll be pretty convincing once you hear it. Do you mind if I just give you the quick version? It’s kinda a long story.” 

“I don’t know about-“ 

“Hold on,” Chara interrupted. “I want to hear this one. Besides, isn’t it cool to hear a story about yourself?” 

Gaster scoffed, but lifted his hands in acceptance. “Fine. But I have many more questions than just hearing some tall tale.” 

“Of course, sir! I’ll get to all in due time. But first, strap in- it’s a good story- the most important one of all!” 

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, a LEGEND was sung throughout the gardens.

It was a legend of LIFE                                                                It was a legend of DEATH

It was a legend of DESPAIR                                                         It was a legend of FREEDOM

This is the legend of

DELTARUNE

Since the beginning of time, all the people who walked the earth lived in the LIGHT above, existing in PEACE.

But when the light was too valuable to share, HUMANS created a DARKNESS below

And there were trapped the MONSTERS.

Unhappy with this new darkness, the monsters sought to return to the light, but in their most desperate efforts...

They only created a second, even deeper darkness.

Just as the monsters were trapped in their prison, so too were the DARKNERS, those born within the lightless abyss even further below.

But while the monsters were stable in their great darkness, the smaller one below was unstable and out of balance.

With no light at all to counteract it, this darkness roiled out of control.

Eventually, the shadows burst forth out into the world above, consuming all that they reached.

The darkners were consumed.

The monsters were consumed.

The second darkness grew too black and impenetrable, and consumed even the first.

Protected by their great and impenetrable BARRIER, the humans continued to live on alone in the light.

Though without a counterbalance, even that light grew too powerful.

It boiled the land and scorched the seas.

The sky screamed white with pain.

And then, her heart pounding

The EARTH drew her final breath.

"Why is this all in past tense? Also, it kinda feels like a bummer of a prophe-"

BUT.

When all was lost, the ANGEL had mercy on its pitiful children.

And undid what once was done.

In this SECOND WORLD, there is another hope.

When no other hope remains for the dark to return to the light, THREE HEROES will appear in the depths of the world.

A HUMAN.

A MONSTER.

And the STEWARD OF THE DARK.

Only they can seal the DARK FOUNTAINS

And call down the ANGEL'S HEAVEN.

Only then can freedom be achieved

And the denizens of the dark brought forth into the light.

Today, the GRAND FOUNTAIN, the geyser that gives this world form, stands proud at the kingdom's center.

But ANOTHER FOUNTAIN has appeared, far to the east.

The pulsing of its heart spells doom for all those who seek freedom.

Our HOPE is not yet lost.

Our DREAMS are not yet gone.

HEROES! Fulfil your DESTINY! 

ACT!

SAVE our people!

"Ahem." The figure coughed. "That last part doesn't usually get told when the heroes are actually here. It's more like, y'know, the 'amen' at the end of a prayer."

Gaster crossed his arms and narrowed his eyes. "I'm not particularly impressed by the predictive abilities of your 'prophecy.' The entire first half was a tale about an alleged previous universe which no longer exists, and the latter half could be easily invented with information that's accessible to all of us. Even if we were to follow its instructions..." he trailed off. His expression looked like he had eaten something sour, like he was trying to hold back tears. 

"So the prophecy ends with the Barrier coming down, huh?" Chara nodded, biting their lip. "Well, you know how to get our attention at least."

"Chara," Gaster growled with what almost sounded like genuine hostility, "do not fall for this shallow ruse! We don't know enough about this place or our position, the promise of..." he choked up again, like he couldn't even say it.

He and Chara made silent eye contact for a few moments, all 14 of Gaster's fists clenched and his lip trembling. 

"Gaster. Who cares? I don't know what sort of insane black hole experiment you were doing a few hours ago, but you almost got all of us killed trying to find a way through the Barrier-"

"I was just trying to reach the first step to the first step, to undo that magic is not so easy-!"

"Then we're in agreement, doctor! Even if it's, what, a 1% chance, less, is that not insanely obviously worth it? He's promising freedom!"

"Anyone would promise freedom!" Four hands made their way to Gaster's forehead, scraping down with twenty fingers in an unsubtle display of how utterly unmoored he'd been by just a few baseless claims. "Don't you see it? You, I, both of us, we're led like sheep by a wolf, at the mere implication of an escape that cannot be proven!"

"Gosh," the stranger's cringe was evident in his tone, "I didn't mean to get you guys upset-"

"We're not upset!" Chara insisted with a manic grin only half reflected in their eyes. "This is the best news we could get! Listen, Gaster, look at this guy! He's clearly not a human, but, but- hey, you, show yourself! Get rid of the hood, I've gotta see!"

The stranger took a step back, startled, but nodded. "Yes, I'm sorry, I've been super duper rude! Let me introduce myself properly!"

With that, he took hold of the top of his hood and pulled it over his head, the rest of the cloth wrappings following it up his back and over his neck until they were thrown off completely. Beneath the hood was a figure that was no less imposing in size or form than before. He certainly looked like a monster, his appearance was like that of a wolf, complete with a muzzle and grey fur. Red pupils matching Chara's stared out from the center of leafy green sclera, though unlike Chara's focused glare they seemed to be full of a certain giddiness. He wore a toga, just as stained by dirt and chlorophyl as his outer cloak had been, and as a belt he wore a metallic depiction of an unmistakable symbol- the body and wings of the Angel on the DELTA RUNE. Over his shoulders was hung a wreath of vines and golden flowers, and one more golden flower was perched cutely in his ear.

"Howdy! I'm Wolfey the wolf! I'm the steward of this little kingdom, in charge of maintaining it until its true rulers arrive- that, and keeping it pretty!" He bowed low with a sweeping flourish. ("That's you two, by the way!")

"I'm the ruler of a kingdom?" Chara seemed genuinely surprised for a moment, but intercepted the show of shock with a sarcastic smirk. "One more, and I'll be starting a collection!"

"My obligations are to King ASGORE and monsterkind as a whole," Gaster countered, "I have no interest in rulership."

"No, no!" Wolfey shook his hands in frantic denial, "it's not like that! You two don't have any obligations to this kingdom!"

Both the lightners leaned back slightly.

"Huh?" Chara blinked.

"Seconded," Gaster agreed.

"Of course, it would be great if you saved the darkners! They're mostly nice, and they'll be happy to help you- but above all, we darkners exist for the convenience of and service to the lightners (that's everyone who was born up on the surface,) particularly you two heroes! If you want a reason to save our world too, I think you should do it out of self-interest! Not only to escape the underground up above, but, and I'm realizing I haven't explicitly said this yet,  sealing that second Dark Fountain will pop you back out into your world, after which time you can come and go freely! If you don't believe the prophecy, if you're willing to leave us to wilt down here, that's your choice! But I think what's best for you, and best for the darkners here, they're the same! Let me guide you East, we'll seal the Dark Fountain, and after you've seen what there is to see, you can decide for yourself if you want to follow the path of the prophecy." 

"So leaving aside the possible fate of all monsterkind, on top of that, sealing that fountain is our only way back home."

Gaster once again narrowed his eyes. "He didn't say it was the only way back. Our duty as heroes is to seal the fountains, right? So what about that one?" One of his floating hands directed its gnarled finger towards the Ground Fountain erupting with all its majesty behind the castle. He still couldn't look directly at it, so his eyes remained firmly fixed on Wolfey's. 

"Uh, sure!" Wolfey replied, immediately looking anxious. "If you sealed the Grand Fountain, it sure would send you back home, but... that Fountain helps maintain balance between light and dark too. Having too many Fountains begins to shift the balance in favor of darkness, but sealing the Grand Fountain would catapult it in the other direction, so... I wouldn't suggest it? Plus, I mean, just between us, it's kinda my home, so it'd be, um, unfortunate if you destroyed it. That, and it'd be really hard to seal in the first place, just getting close would be dangerous. But, ah, if it's your choice, then..."

"Nah," Chara shook their head. "You seem cool. I appreciate how much work you put into this place. It'd be a bummer to erase it all. Just don't backstab us and we'll keep your fountain flowing."

"Chara, you aren't entitled to make this decision on your own-"

"Of course not! But I want to, and Wolfey here wants to, that's 2/1 in favor of doing the adventure."

"Oh," Wolfey said, blushing and cupping his furry cheeks in his hands, "I'm hardly equal to either of you!"

"Sure," Chara waved their hand, "1.5/1 then, or whatever."

Wolfey giggled excitedly. "I'm half a lightner!"

"Enough with this childishness!" Gaster insisted, "we must consider our options carefully and make the most informed possible decision-"

Chara interrupted him by pointing a finger directly at his face. "Doctor Wing Ding Gaster of King Asgore's court! I, Princeps Chara Dreemurr, third in line to the throne of monsterkind, with the authority vested in me by my father and mother, hereby order you to accompany me and Wolfey on a whimsical prophesied adventure to seal that there Dark Fountain." 

Gaster hissed under his breath. "My obligation to King Asgore's orders to do what is best for the Underground as a whole trumps orders that obstruct that goal."

Chara grinned wide, their eyes flashing with a predatory ecstasy. They knew the advantage was theirs. "We have reason to believe that following this path will help us break the Barrier! What could be more in line with my dad's goals and yours than that?"

"I do not believe the reasons you are citing."

"Well, you should consider another obligation you have as my father's servant then, Royal Scientist- keeping me and my brother safe. If you don't come, it'll just be Wolfey and me wandering off into the unknown! Plus, don't forget, neither of us would be in this position if it weren't for your crazy experiment going wrong. Good luck when Wolfey and me get killed since one of the heroes of prophecy was missing, and when you find your way home you have to explain that little story to my mom and dad."

Gaster covered his mouth, growling with such a seething frustration that Chara could hear spittle gargling in his throat. "Fine. But I categorically refuse to inject one iota of whimsy into this. If we're accepting your premise that this is a matter of life and death, for both us and the Underground itself, I shall treat it as such."

"Oooh, but the adventure being whimsical is part of my order, and it doesn't contradict my dad's orders, soooo..." >:3

Gaster leaned down, narrowing his eyes and staring directly into Chara's. "Do not push your luck, you insufferable little creature."

Chara giggled. "You can't win this one, old man. Either we will both die, or you are going to wind up having fun eventually. I don't know which one yet, but I am going to get the better of you yet."

"We shall see. Perhaps a taste of the real danger you've never experienced will teach you to approach these issues with some modicum of understanding of their importance."

Chara's smile vanished so quickly one might be convinced it was never there at all. "You watch your tongue! You think you know anything about what I've-" 

"HEY!" Wolfey inserted himself between the two of them, wearing history's most forced grin. "You two are both new to Dark Worlds, aren't you! Golly, you must be confused! Someone ought to show you how things work around here! I guess little old me will have to do!"

Chara bit their gloved finger, chewing the leather for a few moments before letting out a breath they'd forgotten they were holding. "Yeah, OK."

"Fine," Gaster agreed after a beat, slipping each of his hands into a different pocket on his outfit. "What have you got in mind."

"I... grew you guys a dummy?"

Chapter Text

“Oh, that’s what you meant.”

Nestled in one corner of Wofley’s little castle town was what looked like some sort of small tree, the victim of some rather intense bonsai practices. It was essentially Wofley’s spitting image, complete with two smaller trunks for legs, “waves” in its bark for the folds of his toga, and sprouting leaves only to represent the wreath around his neck and the thicker fur around his head. The only break from reality seemed to be that the depiction’s fingers were filed off to round nubs at the ends, where Chara assumed the real Wolfey had claws under his muddy hand wrappings. 

“I grew this dummy special to help show you two how battles work around here,” Wofley nodded enthusiastically. “(I have plant powers, by the way.)” 

He snapped his fingers, and as if by magic (it was by magic,) the ‘dummy’ sprang to life, bouncing to the beat of some inaudible tune. It didn’t pick up its feet and walk around, probably due to its roots under the ground, but it sure was animated, its arms and head dancing with somewhere upwards of the maximum amount of whimsy one could fit into a tree. 

“Howdy,” the real Wolfey said, covering his mouth while catastrophically failing to throw his voice, “I’m Wolfey, Wolfey the tree! I wanna fight you!” 

“I see,” Gaster deadpanned, having come into this exercise already impatient with it, “so shall we destroy you?” 

“Not yet!” Wolfey said, breaking character and speaking as himself instead of himself. “Down here, not everyone who challenges you will really want to fight! If you ACT instead of FIGHTing, it’ll oftentimes be really easy to get them to give up, and then you’ll have made a new RECRUIT. More friends is always good, and we Darkners can be really useful when we’re on your side. This one’s already wavering, look!” 

Sure enough, Wolfey the Tree had his fists clenched in a boxing stance, but was shaking his head the whole time to indicate that he didn’t support solving one’s problems with violence. 

Chara smirked. “OK, I get it. I’ll give ACTing a shot.” They pointed a finger gun at the tree, flashing a charming look. “Do you really want to fight us?” 

“No!” it replied, helpfully. 

“So, uh,” Chara continued, a bit thrown off by the process being so easy, “do you wanna give up?” 

“Yes!” it confirmed, shifting the tempo and pose of its dance to one more jubilatory. 

“Great job!” Wolfey flashed a thumbs up. “Now that you’ve convinced him, it’s time to SPARE him! Basically, just tell him he can go now that you’re cool.” 

“Uh,” Chara squinted, “sure. You, uh, take care, Wolfey.” 

“The tree,” they elaborated as both Wolfeys turned to look at them in confusion. 

“Oh, sure! Thanks! I’ll make sure to come back and help if you’re ever in trouble!” With that, the tree mimed walking and slowly shrank down into its roots, disappearing into the “sunset.” 

“Will they all be that easy?” Chara cocked an eyebrow. 

“Almost!” Wolfey shouted excitedly, “but there’s another type of enemy!” In a flash, the small pile of leaves that sat where Wolfey the tree had been burst back to life. It returned to its old form, but this time with its arms high above its head in the sort of pose the Wolfman might have before he getsya™. This time, it even sported little thorns at the tip of each of its woody fingers for claws. 

“Evil howdy! I’m Wolfey the EVIL tree!” This time, Wolfey’s attempts at ventriloquism were made with a threatening (?) growl and  a deeper voice. 

“OK, Master Gaster, it’s your turn to try to ACT!” 

“Suuuure,” he rolled his eyes again and turned to his this time much more frightening foe. “Do you truly wish to fight us, Wolfey the evil tree?” 

“Yes!” the indefatigable enemy confirmed with an evil laugh. 

“And is there anything we could do to convince you otherwise?” 

“No! I’m a hardline loyalist to the evil king, and I’ll kill you for sure!” 

“Alas,” Gaster sighed, “my heart weeps at the tragedy, but I must assume this is when we FIGHT.” 

“Yep!” the less evil Wolfey nodded, “if they can’t accept your mercy, then it’s time to kill them! You can use magic even in the Light World, but you should have new powers down here, so why don’t you use Evil Wolfey as an opportunity to test them out?” 

Gaster finally perked up, hearing something interesting for once. “Is that so? Then allow me to-“ 

“Hold on,” Chara waved them off, cracking their knuckles, “let me have a go.” 

“That’s fine, Master Chara! I can fix it easily, so do your worst and there’ll still be plenty left for Master Gaster’s practice!” 

“Ooh, I’m sooo scared!” said evil Wolfey, with a bit more sincerity than perhaps Wolfey had intended. 

“Nah, that’s not what I meant,” Chara responded, keeping their blade sheathed, “hey, you!” 

“Hey, me?” the devilish tree asked, pointing at its trunk. 

“Yeah, you! You wanna fight us, since you’re loyal to this king guy, right?” 

“Yeah!” he confirmed with gusto. 

“But do you wanna die?” 

He paused. “N-no?” 

“But we’re the Heroes of Prophecy!” Chara argued, “we’re literally fated to get past whatever is in our way to seal that Fountain over there.” They pointed off in the direction of the second Dark Fountain off over the horizon. “So if you fight us, you’re certain to lose, right?” 

“Y-yeah, I guess so?” Evil Wolfey couldn’t deny it, though perhaps that was more correlated with Normal Wolfey’s inability to do so. 

“Well, this guy over here says the only two options are to spare you or to kill you.” Chara shoved their thumb in the direction of the real Wolfey, who stumbled back in shock, pointing a finger at his own chest. 

“Me?” 

“Yes, you!” Evil Wolfey confirmed by pointing at him. “I heard you say it!” 

Wolfey gasped in horror. “It’s a betrayal!?” 

“So, if there’s only two ways, and your efforts are doomed to be a failure anyway, why don’t pick the route that leads to you staying alive and accept our extremely generous MERCY?” This time, Chara fired their finger guns akimbo, presumably releasing twice the ACTions or more.

“Oh no!” Wolfey dismayed out of character, “I’m convinced! I got too into the roleplay!” 

“I’m convinced also,” Evil Wolfey confirmed, flashing a thumbs up.

”Then consider yourself spared, you magnificent bastard,” Chara grinned. 

“Wheeee!” Evil Wolfey cried with perhaps a bit more despair than his actor would have used if he’d been more emotionally even, slipping into his own roots like Wolfey The Presumably Good Tree before him. 

“It’s not over,” Wolfey growled with resolve, clenching his fists. “They won’t all be that easy! See if you can handle this one!” 

Once more, the roots sprang to life, this time with yet another Wolfey, this one simply bouncing up and down at his “hips” with his arms hanging from his sides. 

“I’m Wolfey the STUPID tree! I don’t understand simple logic, and I don’t believe in the prophecy, so you can’t convince me that way.” 

Chara grinned smugly. “This one is easy! Hey, Stupid Wolfey, you got mixed up! We’re actually working for the evil king too!” 

“Oh, really?” Both Wolfeys turned to Chara, who squinted. 

“Uh, yeah, we-“ 

“GASTER BUSTER!” 

A beam of concentrated black and purple energy crashed through the Stupid Tree’s trunk, leaving a perfectly round hole in it. 

“Very, very good!” Gaster grinned with eight of his dozen extra floating hands all lined up in a row in front of him. “I figured it out! I can manage some degree of manipulation of the darkness in this world using my spacial magic, and by using my hands as foci to further concentrate it, it can produce an almighty beam of energy! And all that with only eight of twelve lenses in place, what power!” 

After staring in confusion for a few moments, Stupid Wolfey remembered to die, collapsing in on himself like an actual felled tree. 

“Whoah! Good job, Master Gaster!” 

“Yeah, OK,” Chara acknowledged with a shrug, “that was pretty cool. But can you not kill people while I’m in the middle of sparing them?” 

“Yes, I acknowledge that was rude, but I must admit even I was caught up in the excitement of learning a new spell. In the ‘light world,’ as it were, my magic is primarily limited to observational and transportational support magic, with some intermediate skill in healing. To produce that level of destructive force is new for me.”

”Cool name, too,” Chara admitted, “but you should call it Rude Buster or something if you’re gonna interrupt me with it like that.” 

“And what a great sadness it would be to have to change such a fine name. Rest assured, despite my disinterest in our new friend’s demonstration here, I have no intention in unnecessarily committing murder. That said, it would seem your gift for diplomacy well exceeds your family’s. I will let you take point in the ACTing department.” 

Chara bowed proudly. “Thank you, thank you. Anyway, I thought that was pretty fun. Anything else you have to teach us, Wolfey?” 

“Oh, yes,” he nodded. “First off, in real fights, the enemies will probably try attacking you, even while you’re trying to spare them. But never fear! If you get hurt, I can heal you!” 

He held up one finger, above which a small white seed appeared and began floating. “Just run into these little white friendliness pellets, and they’ll heal you right up! Of course, neither of you are hurt, so that’ll have to wait for later.” 

“Nah, I wanna try anyway,” Chara said, drawing their sword. 

“Ah, alright? But it won’t do anything,” Wolfey blinked as he floated a pellet in Chara’s direction. Before it reached them, crimson flashed as Chara ran their blade over their palm, cutting right through their glove and into their flesh. 

“Ow.” 

“MASTER CHARA?!??” 

“Princeps, what in the ANGEL’S NAME are you doing?” 

Chara cocked an eyebrow as they caught the flying pellet in their wounded hand, which immediately began stitching itself up. “Huh? I’m testing Wolfey’s healing move?”

“You’re too important to just chop yourself up like nothing!” Wolfey dismayed. 

“You cannot harm yourself for no reason!” Gaster scratched his own face in instant stress. “Leaving aside your own welbeing, consider what King Asgore and Queen Toriel will do if I return you do them covered in new scars!” 

Chara shrugged, licking the blood off of their palm to get a clearer view at it before pointing it at their concerned companions. “See, no scar.” They paused a moment and looked back at it. “Oh, and even the glove is fixing itself. There’s no harm at all, basically.” 

“Do not do that,” Gaster managed to order in desperation. 

“Yeah, please don’t do stuff like that again, Master Chara. My job is to keep you from getting hurt, so…” 

“Fine, fine,” Chara sheathed their blade and held up their hands in supplication. “I don’t think there was any lasting harm, but I won’t do it again if you guys are so worried.” They decided to refrain from mentioning exactly how it was that they helped Asriel practice his healing magic. 

“Please do not,” Gaster begged. 

“The heroes are already bleeding… and I haven’t even attacked yet! Dad’s gonna make me Son of the Month” 

A voice from above and behind interrupted all three of them from their other considerations. 

Chara and Gaster stared with total astonishment. It was the same round guy who’d fallen into oblivion like an hour ago. 

“You’re alive!?” Gaster gaped in disbelief. 

“Was the bouncing sound you!?” Chara seconded. 

“Oh ho ho,” the fat little creature replied, rubbing its finger under its nose in pride, “I think you’ll find that I’m bouncier than your tiny Lightner minds could comprehend!” 

“OK, I tire of this,” Gaster insisted, “who are you?” 

“Oh?” he chortled, “do you REALLY want to know? To my subjects, I am the one they have to keep out of trouble! To my dad, I’m his bouncing baby boy! To the pointy one you’re hanging out with, I’m a ‘persistent annoyance the heroes are going to blow the bleep away!’ But to you? I’m-“ 

“The bad guy,” Chara interrupted. “You already did that one. We mean for actual.” 

“Oh, like my name?” He cocked his head, and with as little neck as he had, that entailed cocking his entire body. 

“Yeah.” 

“Oh, I’m Lancer,” the boy replied, hopping down to offer Chara a handshake. 

“Cool, I’m Chara. Chara Dreemurr, princeps of the Underground and apparently also this place.” They returned the handshake, easily lifting Lancer and waving him around with one arm. He appeared to be 80-90% air inside.

Lancer gasped. “Oooh, you’re a double prince (gender-neutral?) That’s cool! I’m only a prince one time.” 

“Oh, let me guess, your dad you mentioned is that evil king this dork over here was talking about?” 

“Oh, yes yes yes!” Lancer bounced. “He is very strong and very cool and very dad and very evil! Oh, unless you mean Lesser Dad, that’s probably not the king he meant unless he got really confused.” 

“Well, between you and me,” Chara leaned in close, whispering in Lancer’s ear, “this guy does seem a little stupid, so maybe he got mixed up?” 

Lancer and Chara both laughed while Gaster looked on with the sort of expression someone might wear watching an elephant evacuate its bowels. 

“Get outta here!” Wolfey shouted, causing a vine to burst out from the ground that uppercutted Lancer, sending him flying back up to coincidentally the same wall he’d been standing on when he first began harassing them. “Master Chara, you can’t trust this devious darkner! He’s going to try to trick you into becoming evil!” 

“I don’t know,” Chara raised an eyebrow, “he seems kinda forthright about that.” 

“I love going right and forth!” Lancer confirmed. 

Gaster pinched the bridge of his nose. 

“So, like,” Chara put their hands on their hips, “do you wanna fight us?” 

“Yes! Oho yes! Very extremely!” 

They smirked, shifting their left hand to their knife. “Cool. I was getting tired being nice to trees. You seem pretty durable.” 

“I was just hoping the same thing about you!” Lancer agreed, the air around him crackling black with spades.

Chapter Text

*The chapter is empty, but...

*For some reason, even though you're totally alone...

*You hear a rustling in the ground.

*You don't need to buzz off.

*It seems the flower disappeared all on its own already.

*It's just you and me now.

Chapter Text

"This is nutty!" Chara laughed with glee as they ducked and dived between scores of flying spades that spun through the air like a whirlwind. "And this guy isn't anything special for a darkner?"

"Monster lightners are made of magic, but down here in the Dark World, everything is made of dark, so it's easier to wrangle up flashy moves," Wolfey elaborated as he sheltered behind a massive thorny vine, "no matter who you are, you'll get stronger down here."

"Consider that your warning, prince of the dark!" shouted Gaster, lining up eight hands to fire off another Gaster Buster. "I imagine you must have seen what this attack did to the tree. I would propose that you surrender swiftly before you- GAAAH, my ankle!" He immediately lost concentration as a spade managed to weave its way in to crack him just above the collar of his finely-cobbled dress shoes. "Hell!" Dedicating eight hands to his special attack only permitted him four more with which to defend himself, a number which proved insufficient in this chaotic environment. What Wolfey said intrigued him, though- in the Light World, he'd had control of six pairs of extra hands since he was a boy, but it may well be that he could summon more down here. Something to study later. For now, he was hopping on one foot and decommissioning his railgun to scrap it for parts to add to his own defenses.

"Seems kinda unfair that magic is so much easier for everyone else and yet I still can't use it!" Chara's grousing was halfhearted. They were legitimately annoyed, but it was hard to maintain a bad mood in the heat of battle. Plus, the sword was very cool. At the moment, it trailed behind them as they sprinted through the field of oncoming spades, closing the distance with Lancer. They focused on him, trying to get a read on his abilities. As a matter of fact, they'd always had a very good eye for that sort of thing. 

LANCER - ATK: 7 DEF: 1 MAG: 5 - A lot bouncier than a bicycle.

Well, this one wasn't exactly going to be a knock-down drag-out brawl. The fight certainly seemed overwhelming, probably thanks to what Wolfey mentioned about Dark World magic seeming a lot more impressive, but leaving aside their surprise and unpreparedness for Lancer to be throwing out so many magical projectiles at once, all three of the alleged heroes were thus far able to evade or defend themselves quite well. Chara closed their eyes for a moment and focused on taking an internal inventory of their own abilities.

Chara - LV 1 Rogue
No special powers, but they'll take a stab at it.
HP: 90/90 ATK: 24 DEF: 1 MAG: 0
Weapon: Red Knife - Their most constant companion. Can't be replaced. +9 ATK -1 DEF 
Armor: None

Well, not much surprising there. This isekai getup they were wearing obviously wasn't any good for defense considering they sliced through it with trivial ease. It was a bit odd their knife actually reduced their defense, but it seemed like a worthy tradeoff compared to what the others seemed to be carrying around.

W. D. Gaster - LV 3 Mad Scientist
His brain gets him into messes only his brain can get him out of.
HP: 64/66 ATK: 15 DEF: 7 MAG: 21
Weapon: Tailored Gloves - Not bespoke. Missing a half-dozen pairs. +4 MAG
Armor: None

He'd fought in the war and was probably ten times Chara's age, so it tracked that he was stronger than them overall. Still, Chara noted with pride that he seemed to be taking to this battle slower than they did, despite his greater experience. Well, it made sense. All monsters fought in the war, that didn't mean he was actually cut out for soldiery. One more left to CHECK out.

Wolfey - LV 1 Dark Steward
Lives to serve, like all his kind.
HP: 140/140 ATK: 12 DEF: 0 MAG: 18
Weapon: Golden Wreath - Chara's favorite flowers. Never far from reach. +2 ATK +2 MAG 
Armor: Shinewing - The ANGEL's wings protect all. Grants other party members +1 DEF. +2 MAG

As far as Chara could tell, their initial observations about the guy had been mostly right. He was big and scary, but not the most competent in the world, and that seemed to include fighting. It also wasn't a surprise that he seemed more suited to protecting them than himself, considering the way he talked. Plus, they were now extra confident about their initial guess that all these golden flowers happening to be identical to the ones that'd they were so fond of back on the surface wasn't a coincidence.

Chara had always had a good sense for cold-reading, that was to say guessing how someone was feeling or what they were thinking from a glance, but it looked like their insight had improved considerably down here. Perhaps somehow this blinding darkness actually made it easier to see. One way or another, they had some very strong hunches about the general battle capabilities of their team, and the conclusion of those collective hunches was that Lancer was about to get absolutely thrashed. Cool for them, but kind of a bummer for Lancer, which in turn was kind of a bummer in general, the poor guy.

"Hey, Lancer!"

"Yes, double-princies?" 

"The minute these two stop freaking out, you're about to get pounded into the ground! And it'll hurt- bad, probably. Sound like fun?"

"Probably not? I've only been pounded up into the air before; I haven't tried the ground!"

"It is not fun," Chara nodded with grave wisdom even as they continued to sidestep the flying black spades. "Take it from me."

"I think I'd prefer not to take it from anyone!" Lancer clarified with concern. "It sounds bad!"

"Bad bad bad," Chara agreed. "So do you want some alternative options?"

"Sure!" Lancer replied, sticking out his tongue in excitement. "I love choices! Sometimes, I make two or three of them in a day!"

"That's crazy, kid." Chara's expression of wonder at least appeared admirably genuine. "Well, here's your two choices. One, you let me kill you in one clean hit! I'm pretty sure you won't even feel a thing!"

Lancer blinked, once again wobbling his entire body to a 45 degree angle in confusion. "I hope one of the other options is better?"

"Two- you run away back to your dad and tell him that you got totally scared and ran away from the Lightners so you wouldn't get your sorry butt handed to you, and then he'll make you WORST son of the month!"

Lancer gasped in horror, slapping his cheeks with both hands so hard that all the air was transferred to his sorry butt and he bounced probably a hundred feet straight up in the air. "Oh no! My streak! That's my second-most-prized possession!"

("After what?")

("I forgot what it was after I buried it, but if I buried it it must have been really good!")

("Was it a Son of the Month trophy?")

("Oh yeah! I was saving it for a dirty day!")

"Option three- you just give up on fighting us, we become friends, and no butts have to get kicked. I feel like you and me get along better than me and the super hero squad over here anyway."

Lancer had begun falling back to the ground after launching himself, but he paused suddenly to think about this, crossing his legs and his arms as he slowly rotated. "Weeeeeellllllll... my dad wouldn't be very happy with that, but I guess I wouldn't have to tell him right away............."

Conveniently, as he paused, his attacks had also all frozen in midair, giving Gaster and Wolfey both time to stop defending.

"Master Chara is right! (I mean, I'd prefer if we didn't have you bumming around our team, but nothing's ever perfect.) You can live, and dedicate your life to good instead of evil!"

"Can I still do a little evil?"

"To add on to my companions' points," Gaster interjected, once again having lined up the majority of his hands in a row, "you landed a direct hit on me a moment ago. Had I been struck that way by a human, I'd have been immediately crippled or killed. But that mediocre blow of yours was not even worth healing." He refrained from reminding anyone of how it had him jumping up and down like a cartoon cat who'd encountered some misadventure. "You are well and truly out of your league. Surrender or retreat are preferable to death- perhaps you could open a shop instead? Either way, the probability that you might emerge from this battle victorious is less than infinitesimal."

"Also, yes, Lancer, you can still do a little bit of evil if you join our team," Chara encouraged with two thumbs-up, sensing he was wavering more than before. Wavering in which wavelength, though, had become unclear.

"Well... I..........." Lancer frowned, pouting. "I'll run away!" With that, he began sprinting away across the sky, using his spades as a floating footpath. 

"W-wait!" Chara yelled, "what about your dad?"

"I won't have to get demoted if he never knows I ran away! I'll just figure out how to capture you before I go home for afternoon tea and crumpets!"

"I imagine you could extend your time by skipping the tea and crumpets?" Gaster offered against his will.

"NO!" The other three shouted, emphatically rejecting the idea of skipping the sixth most decadent meal of the day. 

"Alright, alright!" Gaster put his hands up, balking immediately at the idea of engaging in anything close to an argument with these three all against him.

"But seriously, are you sure?" Chara raised an eyebrow. "I feel like it's easier to just make friends."

"Sorry," Lancer said, shaking his head, "but I think you're spending time with the wrong crowd. You shouldn't hang out with such bad influences! Besides, even if I miss out on my Son of the Month award, you reminded me I have an extra one in reserve, so I can maintain my streak!"

("But a Worst Son of the Month award plus losing your normal award is negative 1 awards, not just zero! You'll wind up losing out anyway!")

("This one is vintage! Its value has appreciated over time! Actually, it's worth way more than just two of the cheap trophies they mint these days!")

Chara snapped their fingers in frustration as Lancer bounced away into the dark skies. "Darn! That guy thinks of everything!"

Gaster sighed as Wolfey shot a Friendliness Pellet at his ankle, repairing the slight touch of damage he'd taken in the previous fight. "It was a good effort, Chara."

Chara pouted, rubbing the toe of their boot on the ground underneath them mopily. "It's you guys' fault that it didn't work. You scared him off by being too scary."

"Master Chara, didn't you threaten to kill him?"

"I offered to kill him," Chara helpfully corrected, "but you two were all mean about it, telling him to dedicate his life to being good and that he was really weak. Nobody likes a bully," they chided.

Wolfey tugged at his collar, whining under his breath. "Well, it could have gone better, but still!" He brightened. "You guys just won your first fight! Even though it didn't actually end with an enemy being removed like recruiting or killing him would have.  It's proof of concept! And even if Lancer's not even close to the strongest person in his dad's kingdom, he's still stronger than the average servant you'll run into, not to mention harder to convince."

"His dad's kingdom," Gaster repeated with a grumble. "Do not think I just overlooked that. You mentioned nothing of an evil king, nor any sort of adversary at all, until the business with the little tree. Who is it that this adventure of yours will have us fighting?" His tone had changed somewhat. Whereas before he had sounded at times frustrated and at others bored with the rare interjection of open anger, now his words rolled out with the dangerous calm of a snake in the grass. Where before he was disinterested in Wolfey and eager to move on, now his attention was fully devoted to his next response.

Wolfey took a step back, making no attempt to hide his mingled fear and shame. "You're right, I didn't tell you... everything. It's complicated, and I don't fully understand myself, but- you both should know what you're up against to the best of my ability. Basically, this place is called the ������land, and you're in ������TOWN right now."

Chara blinked. No one noticed how Gaster reacted.

"What?" Chara said. "I don't think I... got that one?"

"Yes," Gaster agreed, shaking his head, "what did you say?"

"Yeah, exactly," Wolfey nodded. "It's hard to explain, but that name, it's holy to darkners, but lightners don't understand it. Even we don't know what it means, we're just born with it in our heads. But there's no bones about it, the place I'm here to take maintain and take care of is called ������land, and it's named for... something important. But you're the true rightful rulers of it. I'm sure of that! I won't pretend that even I know why, but there's no doubt about it. Everything I know about the prophecy tells me that the Kingdom of ������ is yours. That said, that isn't really the tough part. The problem is that beyond that door-" Wolfey pointed at the gigantic red double doors that Chara and Gaster had noticed from all the way across the land- "������land ends. After that is the Card Kingdom, where Lancer comes from. This place is empty, for now, (the darkners we recruit will join me here eventually,) but out there, the world is crawling with darkners, all under the rule of the King. He's forced them under his heel, and many of them will be forced to battle us. Some will do it willingly. I can tell that both of you are strong, stronger than me, and I doubt most darkners out there will be any serious threat, but... the King..." His gaze lowered and he frowned, letting out another low whine under his breath.

"He's strong?" Chara asked, an image forming clearly in their mind. A great cape, a tremendous body, a pair of curved horns, a crown, a trident- the strongest silhouette they could possibly imagine. 

"Monstrously so," Wolfey confirmed, "and absolutely impossible to convince to change his mind. If you want to get to the Dark Fountain, meeting him is inevitable, and if you meet him, fighting him is inevitable. He's not invincible, we can beat him, but he won't be weak, and it will be risky. With him, it's a matter of life and death. It's kill or be killed."

"I have stood side by side a greater king than he could possibly be," Gaster spoke with a clarity and confidence he had rarely had since arriving in this strange world. "I have no fear of this man, nor have I respect for tyrants. He will fall."

"Yeah," Chara agreed, nodding. "I only bow to one person. I'm not scared of him." And, they silently reasoned, they'd be able to make a pretty educated guess of their odds of beating him once they saw them. At worst, they'd cut and run and look for another solution another day. "Oh, but, just to be sure, this King guy... he's a darkner like you, right?"

"Not just like me, but... yes, he's a darkner. He was born down here with the rest of us."

Overlooking the true meaning behind Chara's question, Gaster followed up with one of his own. "If the darkners are made to serve lightners, why are you so certain he would never comply?"

"Not all objects actually do their jobs," Wolfey responded with audible dismay. "Some darkners are just broken from the start. Some get broken with time or wear, and others are broken on purpose by others. I don't know what happened to King, but even though one day he was just like me, taking care of the place until its true rulers appeared, now he's trying to raise up all the darkners to rebel against the lightners, to kill the heroes. Most of them know, deep down, that it's wrong. They will be easy to convince otherwise. But someone like King... a traitor of the highest order..." Wolfey's clenched fists shook with barely contained rage. "He's poison. And an enemy that has to be removed if you're ever going to be safe."

Chara narrowed their eyes. "Alright. But we'll see for ourselves."

"Seconded," Gaster agreed. "You have appeared trustworthy thus far, but we will not be executing anyone on your advisement alone."

"Only deposing," Chara added.

"Yes, indeed. Only deposing." 

"Okay," Wolfey said, "just be careful, is all. He's crafty and sadistic. He'd betray you even if it didn't give him benefit, but if it gets to the point he doesn't think he can win by playing fair, he'll absolutely try something nasty like a fake surrender. If you want to spare him, that's your choice, but just don't... trust someone like that too easily."

"Sure," Chara agreed. Yeah, they'd keep an eye out, alright. "So... are we ready to go? I don't feel tired, sleepy, hungry..."

"This place is like a dream," Wolfey explained. "In here, your body's needs are... muffled. Eat sometimes, sit down and take a rest every once in a while, it'll be enough. I can go if all of you are ready."

"I am," Gaster nodded. "I'm not sure how much time has passed since we came here, but I am not inclined to waste any more of it. Let us take our leave of this... somethingtown."

Chara, inspired, gave it their best shot at pronouncing it. After thirty seconds, they realized they'd only exhaled all the air from their lungs without noticing and desperately inhaled again. "OK, it's pointless to try that. Let's go."

"So be it." Wolfey led them to the great gates, so massive that he needed to spend several minutes conjuring enormous vines and tree trunks to forcibly shove them open. As the doors cracked, revealing a world of completely different colors and shapes from Wolfey, the lightners even noticed that he'd needed to summon them on the other side as well to add to the force.

Slamming back closed after they trio passed through, though? That, at least, was all the doors' own doing. 

They would open again.

Chapter Text

As per Wolfey's promise, it seemed that very few of the King's servants were a substantial threat to the trio of heroes. The field immediately to the east of the Great Door was sparsely populated by groups of "guards" who seemed to be either utterly incompetent or just unwilling to do their jobs for real. Thus far, as much as they would have liked to deny it, Wolfey seemed to have been right about most things there was evidence for or against.

RUDINN- ATK: 5 DEF: 0 MAG: 2 - When you live Underground, diamonds aren't actually that valuable.

King sucks! We're cool!" Chara shouted as they easily deflected rows of incoming diamond projectiles. "People who work for him are tools!"

"They're super convincing!" said one Rudinn to the other, "I think we should stop fighting them!"

"You make a good point about their good point," its partner agreed, "we give up!"

"Cool," Chara grinned, "you should run off to wherever the people we spare run off to."

HATHY- ATK: 2 DEF: 0 MAG: 5 - When you live Underground, hearts are actually way more valuable than most things.

"There are people who would literally kill for hearts like yours," Chara complimented Hathy, who immediately began blushing. "It would be a total shame if I had to be one of those people though." 

Hathy at first stopped blushing, but then paused to think about it, and then eventually settled on simply having a lower opacity blush. 

"Also, uh, I think your teeth are really cool! They look like knives!"

"Eh!?" Wolfey gasped, covering his mouth.

"I- I meant the one with the tentacles?" Chara deadpanned back, squinting. "Why would you think I... whatever, man."

Despite the mixup, Hathy seemed very pleased by both compliments and happily allowed itself to be spared.

"What odd creatures these darkners are," Gaster eventually said as they watched the little thing slither off.

"No offense, but honestly to me they don't seem that much weirder on average than you monsters." Chara shrugged. "But you're also picking up on a theme, right?"

Gaster blinked. "I'm not sure what you mean."

"Whatever," Chara repeated. "I'll elaborate when I'm more sure."

"Hey, Wolfey, are those fruits up in those trees?" Chara said, pointing up at some star-shaped objects up in their boughs, shimmering in the darkness. Shimmering with darkness?

"Well, kinda! They grow on the trees, but they're not fruit exactly- they're candy! Dark Candy! Actually, this is a good time to mention that down here, eating food will restore your health and heal your wounds."

"Our food also does that," Gaster added.

Wolfey blinked. "Yeah, I guess it does. Well, down here, all the food is made of darkness, which should work the same as your monster food made of magic. Would you two like some?"

"Sure!" Chara said, licking their lips.

"It will be good to have for later," Gaster nodded. "My healing abilities are not exceptional, and having food can save magical energy for more important spells." 

"Great! I'll get it for you!" Wolfey pointed at the tree, firing a seed into it which evidently seemed to grant him control. With a wave of his finger, all the candies fell from the tree and he picked up a bundle, passing them out to Gaster and an immediately incensed Chara.

"Hey! Why did you take all the candy!? That won't leave any for anyone else?"

"W- I-" Wolfey stammered, "it's only one tree, and they're all covered in candies! And this kingdom is rightfully yours, all of it belongs to you to begin with!"

Chara leaned their head back and stared down their nose at him. "Disgusting. If you're really my servant, you'd better learn to have more respect for the public good. A few candies for each of us is fine- any that we can't carry with us should stay on the tree! Now, you had better either reattach all those extra ones if your powers let you do that, or regrow them if they don't."

Wolfey shuddered at his first taste of genuine disapproval from Chara that didn't seem to be just petulant complaints. "Y-yes, of course, right away!" He gestured to the tree again, the boughs of which began reaching down to recollect the candies that had been left on the ground.

"Oh," Chara added, "and leave the candies on the lower branches where it's easier for people without cheating superpowers to grab them."

"Got it, Master Chara!" Wolfey nodded frantically, his ears pinned to his head and his tail squeezed between his legs. "I'm sorry!"

Gaster cocked his head at Chara. "I didn't realize you felt so strongly about this sort of thing."

Chara huffed. "There are rules. If you see a tree full of tasty fruit, that's because the people who got there before you didn't take any, or only took a few. When you steal them all (or worse, steal some and just leave the rest to go to waste,) you're breaking an unbroken chain of kindness that goes back to the start of time (or at least to the start of the tree). If you can't tell what's wrong with that, I don't know what you expect me to tell you."

"I'm sorry again," Wolfey said, finishing his work. "I'll make sure it doesn't happen again."

"Good," Chara sighed, letting their face reset to neutral, "I don't see the point of being in charge if I can't make rules that get followed, so you better."

C-Round - ATK: 1 DEF: 0 MAG: 0 - Its mind is preoccupied by thoughts of regicide.

"This one's literally no threat at all," Chara said with their hands on their hips. "Hey, little guy, you should give up."

It kicked its way over, performing a perfect polka (or something) until it reached Chara's ankle, which it kicked with vicious lethality.

HP - 89/90

"Ouch," Chara blinked. "I guess you're not a big talker. Seriously, though, I'd rather be friends."

It leaped into the air, performing several spins before landing a direct quintuple-roundhouse kick on Chara's neck for critical damage!

HP - 87/90

"I can't help but feel like I'm just not getting through to this guy. Gaster, Wolfey, do you have any ideas? Normally if I couldn't spare a guy I'd just say let's kick his ass, but I don't really want to fight this poor little thing."

True to that goal, when C-Round fired off its next earthshattering kick, Chara just shuffled a foot or two to the left to dodge it. 

"Well, it's a checker," Wolfey thought aloud, "so maybe we can beat it in some kind of checkers-type way?"

"Checkers?" Gaster asked, curious.

Chara blinked. "Do monsters not know checkers? Wait, no, of course you do, mom has boards in her house. Dad plays chess almost every day! (Badly.)"

"Oh," Gaster nodded with recognition, "like chess? So it's a game played on a board?"

"Wow," Wolfey wondered, "you really don't know. Uh, well, it's played on a 64 space chessboard, but you only use 32 of the squares..."

For the next minute or two, Wolfey explained checkers' simple rules to Gaster while Chara backed off a few feet every time that C-Round decided to attack again.

"I think I get it," Gaster nodded. "Let me try to spare this one, Chara."

"Thaaanks," Chara replied, having backed quite some distance away from the conversation by that time. "Are you thinking of just hopping over him or something? I've been considering trying that but once I asked for your help I wanted to give you a shot."

"Hey," Gaster said to C-Round, briefly drawing its intense killing intent away from Chara. "Pay attention."

He squatted next to the grinning little enemy, looking it in the eye and taking a deep breath. "Alright, good, now listen closely. 10 to 15, 23 to 18, 7 to 10, 21 to 17, 15 to 19, 24 to 15 capturing 19, 10 to 19 capturing 15, 27 to 24, 12 to 16, 24 to 15 capturing 19, 2 to 7, 17 to 14, 7 to 10, 14 to 7 capturing 10, 3 to 10 capturing 7, 10 to 19 capturing 15, 31 to 27, 16 to 20, 22 to 17, 19 to 24, 28 to 19 capturing 24, 11 to 15, 19 to 10 capturing 15, 6 to 15 capturing 10, 25 to 22, 15 to 24 capturing 22, 30 to 26, 8 to 11, 26 to 22, 11 to 18 capturing 22, 32 to 27, 18 to 25 capturing 29, 27 to 31, 25 to 18 capturing 23, 5 to 9, 18 to 14, 9 to 18 capturing 14, 29 to 25, 18 to 23 capturing 25, 27 to 32, 23 to 27, 32 to 28, 27 to 32, 22 to 18, 12 to 16, 15 to 11, 16 to 19, 18 to 14, 32 to 27, 11 to 7, 27 to 31, 7 to 3, 1 to 6, 3 to 8, 4 to 11 capturing 8, 14 to 10, 6 to 15 capturing 10, leaving red with no pieces remaining. Black wins. You'll have to forgive me for making your moves, but it would seem you aren't especially talkative, so I assumed you wouldn't want the inconvenience of coming up with your own moves. If you'd prefer, though, we can have a rematch according to your own game style."

The little guy's dance stopped altogether, and Chara could feel its murderous energy dissipating. After it had had another two or three minutes to calculate its utter defeat, it collapsed on its back with its legs kicked up in the air and tongue flopped out of its mouth. 

"Hm," Gaster blinked, "I do hope that was sparing it and not... killing it on the spot?"

"It'll be fine!" Wolfey grinned. "It's admitted its defeat, and it's loyal to you now! Good job!"

"I see. I suppose all that's to be done is to move on, then."

"Oh!" Chara brightened when they walked into a new room with a wall of spikes blocking the path and several tiles on the ground. "It's a puzzle! Just like in Home!"

"Yes," Gaster nodded, "I've hired contractors to install a few puzzles around the CORE and greater Hotland as well. I could get us through the spikes easily with my portals, but I presume you'd like to solve this one?"

"Actually," Wolfey said, "these next few are team puzzles! I think it'll take at least two of us to beat them, if not all three. Oh, that's if you're not doing cheaty type stuff, though."

"Oh, then you guys join me! I love puzzles with friends!" Chara wandered to the wall, where a clock sat next to a button. "Well, I assume this is it." They punched the button and two of the tiles on the floor lit up as the clock's single hand began swiftly making its 360 degree journey. "Yep, this is it." Chara spun to face the other two Heroes of Prophecy. "My loyal subjects, quickly! One of you stand on each of those buttons!"

Gaster rolled his eyes but wandered over to step on one of the glowing ones while Wolfey bounded to the other. With a clicking sound, a different two lit up.

"And rotate!"

The process repeated once more, and after a total of six buttons were pressed with the appropriate timing, the spikes retreated.

"Wow, that was actually easier than the puzzles in Home," Chara frowned. "I was kinda expecting like, a memory puzzle or something. All this was was a test to see if you have a friend or not. I guess that does explain why all the darkners move in pairs at least, though." 

"Yes," Gaster agreed, "this one was disappointing. Perhaps, like in the Underground, the puzzles increase in complexity as you travel East."

"I haven't heard of any that are super tough," Wolfey admitted, frowning. "If I'd known that both of you liked puzzles, I would have set some up in ������TOWN."

"It's OK," Chara waved their hand, "if you'd tried to challenge us with puzzles right when we met you we probably would have just been annoyed."

"Indeed," Gaster nodded, "more likely than not I would have just cheated them using my abilities (as often is easy for me,) which would have ruined the fun to begin with. Now that we are making progress, I have a degree more patience. That said, shall we move ahead?"

Beyond them was a second puzzle, one which seemed roughly the same and opened a gate leading north. This time, it was "harder" only in the regard that it required all three of them to step on platforms rather than just two, so Chara had to actually step up instead of just barking orders. Gaster could have easily completed it solo (and while just sitting around, even) with his extra hands, but taking a moment to galivant around wasn't bad either. Even the easiest puzzles provided a bit of enrichment.

The trio approached an odd little structure labeled as a shop. They'd noticed that their enemies, upon being spared, left behind a bit of money in the form of Dark Dollars. This was similar to how minor conflicts were resolved among monsterkind, where the party who agreed they'd been in the wrong would donate a bit of gold for the winner's trouble. 

"Shall we visit the shop?" Gaster asked. "I'm curious what sort of wares are available in this world."

"Probably it'll have some equipment like weapons or armor, and then some healing items. It can't hurt to check!" Wolfey nodded his head.

"Works for me," Chara agreed. With that, it was unanimous, and the trio wandered inside. 

Immediately, it was striking that compared to the humble shack they'd entered, the structure was absolutely cavernous on the inside. Physical impossibilities like this weren't rare among monster structures either, but the almost pitch darkness within still made it somewhat ominous. All that was visible was a long wooden counter atop which was a single metal bell. Gaster hesitantly rang it from some distance with one of his extra hands, and with that, a terrible rumbling sound immediately began. All three of the heroes readied their weapons in caution as a gigantic shape slowly made its appearance, rising from behind the counter. It was close to 30 feet long, over 10 feet tall. Its gigantic head sported three large horns and a towering shield that-

"Oh!" Chara squeaked excitedly, "a triceratops!"

"Not quite." Gaster squinted in confusion. It certainly had a triceratops' head, not to mention its tail, but between those was... a big orange truck? Like a bulldozer with its front scoop replaced by a dinosaur's head? Though it did seem that one of its tires was missing altogether.

"Don't be so concerned, travelers," the great thing spoke in its smooth but overpowering voice, "I'm no danger to you. My name is Seam, spelled S-E-A-M. I run this humble shop."

"What's with your body?" Chara asked, still with stars flickering in their eyes at the sight of a real live mostly-dinosaur.

"Long ago, I was quite grievously wounded. This machine, too, was damaged nearly beyond repair. It was fortuitous for both of us that we could be combined into the cyborg form I now possess."

"Oh!" Gaster gasped with his sudden realization, "I do know you! You, you're that toy, you belong to..." he snapped his fingers, trying to remember, "I cannot place his name, but my assistant Sans' younger brother."

"Papyrus?" Chara offered, questioningly.

"Ah, yes, right!"

("How did you know that?")

("Seriously? He's basically the only thing that guy ever talks about.")

"I couldn't guess what you mean, though the name 'Papyrus' does put me in mind of good memories... would you like to browse my wares?"

"Sure!" Chara confirmed.

The big thing sold a few pieces of food (including Monster Candies, of which they already had plenty,) but also some equipment.

Ball Blade - Though some bleed red and others black, enemies cut by this particular sword bleed blue. +2 ATK

Runed Shield - Though thin, this shield is emblazoned by magical runes that increase its strength. +1 DEF, Memory UP!

"Well, this sword is total junk compared to mine," Chara said, "but if we can each fit two pieces of armor, I'll take four of the Runed Shields, please."

"A bulk buyer," Seam purred, "how very royal of you." They slid four white shields along their counter, each one scribbled on by seemingly random symbols in black and blue. Chara gladly slid one onto each of their arms, glad to interrupt the design consistency of their annoyingly boring outfit. 

Gaster glanced at his own with confusion, resolving to take a closer look at it later. 

"So you know we're royalty, or whatever?" Chara asked.

"It's made its way through the ol' grapevine," Seam nodded, their horns bouncing perhaps ten feet up and down with that motion alone. "Folks around here are more than a bit excited about your return. I've heard some of the King's troops are breaking rank even before you meet them, now." 

"What's the deal with that, anyway?" Chara continued, "if the people here are so excited to see us, how did this King convince them all to follow him if he hates us?"

"It wasn't all too long ago that the lightners mingled with us... like gods to our kind, you see, giving us shape, form, and function. But they vanished, leaving us alone in the dark. Many among us have hoped for their return, but something changed not long ago... Historically, this kingdom was ruled by four kings, but something appeared recently, and three of the kings vanished altogether. In its wake, the King became obsessed with his enmity with the lightners, and others, including an old friend of mine, went mad altogether. No one, aside from perhaps the King, knows exactly what that something was, but there's no doubt it's dangerous beyond measure. You should watch your step moving forward. That said..." they chuckled darkly, "even that thing seems to be long gone by now. Who knows, come a big longer, maybe someone else will come around, and our new ruler will lash out in wrath at that something."

"Do you know, at least, if that something was a darkner or a lightner? A human or a monster?" Gaster cocked his head, trying to puzzle out the potential candidates."

"Why of course I do," Seam chuckled again, "I know it wasn't."

"You certainly are a cryptic character," Gaster crossed his arms. "Is there anything else you'd like to tell us?"

"I've heard that old prophecy," they began. "Not the whole thing, of course, I don't know if anyone has heart it in full, but bits and pieces. I believe you will seal this kingdom's fountain. I do not imagine it will be any great challenge for you. To me, it makes little difference. Know this, though; your great quest, to escape from darker, to dark, to light... regardless of the prophecy's words, I fear fate may be against you."

"I do not believe in fate," Gaster replied, as though he'd said it a thousand times before. "Nor any prophecies, nor ANGELs, nor higher powers at all. If I am mistaken, and indeed they exist, then perhaps our goal will be somewhat easier, or somewhat more difficult. But what I am certain of beyond any doubt is that I will succeed. I am endowed with intellect, yes, but above that, I am endowed with persistence. With will. With DETERMINATION. There is no circumstance under which I will abandon my goal or die before it is accomplished. So do not feel the need to offer me your opinion on fate, nor any prophecy's opinion. That will be all, thank you for your wares."

Seam merely smiled faintly and let out a low rumble, though whether it was one of laughter or something else was impossible to tell. "Very well. I apologize for stepping out of my bounds as a darkner, Doctor Wing Ding Gaster."

"Oh," he glanced away, frowning. "I tire of that sort of talk just as much." 

Chapter Text

*You moving to the next chapter interrupts the silence...

*And again, a little something pops up from the ground.

* The little flower buzzes off on its own again.

* What a rude little thing it is, for being so pretty.

* Worse, it seems to know less than it thinks...

* And say less than it knows.

* But I suppose we all do, from time to time.

* Well, don't mind me.

* Unlike it, I like the noise.

Chapter Text

"Give it to me straight, kid. You think those two are alive in there, somehow or another?"

Gerson Boom, the Hammer of Justice, sat heavily on an uncomfortable-looking stool outside of a makeshift jail cell in the capital of the monster kingdom. The wooden chair sagged and groaned under his weight, but he still didn't prop himself up by his hammer as he he had a tendency to do. Instead, the hammer, too, sagged down to the ground, held loosely in one hand.

"dunno," Sans replied from the corner of his cell, where he sat squeezed into its furthest edge. "from the start, we knew we were getting ourselves in deep into something we didn't totally have our heads wrapped around, but what wound up happenin'... it was beyond any of our wildest expectations. like we went too far. like we broke somethin' important."

"So, when that smoke clears, you figure we'll just find dust? Maybe nothin'?"

"i don't know enough to know whether we should have hope," Sans replied, "so i gave up on it already." He winked, his constant smile poorly matching the tone of his voice. 

"Well, the way I see it, a smart cookie like you should be workin' on figurin' out a way to make your way through quick. I hear your understudy's puttin' her heart and soul into it, but there's you, mopin' in the corner like somebody who don't care at all."

"it's a waste of time." Sans sighed. "i didn't always see eye to eye with the doc, but he was a mental titan. but-"

"Was?"

"but he didn't even know enough about what was going on to even predict the possibility of what happened here. you think me and alph can untangle it without him? just give up. it'll make the ground softer when you finally hit it."

Gerson snorted derisively. "You really are pathetic. You could be doing anything. You could escape out of this joke of a prison like that," he snapped his fingers, "it's not like an old man like me could stop someone with your abilities. You don't want little Alphys to die, do you? You could free her, or you could help her solve this, or you could just step off your ass for thirty seconds and pretend you're making progress. Hell, you know as well as I do that the King and Queen would take any excuse they could find to punish you as little as possible, no matter how much they hate you for what happened." With a groan, he rose from his stool, lifting his hammer and pointing it at Sans. "But look at you! You god damned lump! If the doctor and Chara could get saved but don't, it'll be on your bony ass! If Alphys gets executed because of this, that'll be your fault! And I'll tell you, you're right about one thing, you little rat, you sure as hell could never break the Barrier without Gaster's help, considering the split-second going gets tough you-" he heaved and dropped to one knee, grinding his teeth. He huffed and puffed for a while, trying to get his breathing steady again. "God damn it... you arrogant, self-obsessed little rat. Chara is missing... their child is missing, do you even know what that means?"

He wiped tears from his eyes as he slowly dragged himself up to his feet. Sans remained completely motionless in the corner, eyes black, almost indistinguishable from a human corpse. 

"You have a brother, don't you? You're raising him yourself. You want to leave him behind!? You want to leave him rotting in this damn cave? Hell, if it was him who was missing, would you be sitting around doing nothing, waiting to die?"

"'course not," Sans replied, wryly. "if it was paps who'd gotten sucked into that thing..." he shrugged, grinning a bit wider, "i'd just kill myself."

He didn't even flinch as a glowing green hammer, constructed from magic, cracked the stone wall inches from his head, shot full-force by Gerson. 

"COWARD! You miserable, sniveling, self-obsessed little coward! I pray that Alphys manages what you don't have the stones to even try, but if it weren't for your poor brother, I..." He bit his wrist, stifling more tears. After more than a minute had passed, he let go, leaving an ugly brown mark running along his thick hide. "You're too scared to run, too scared to help, too scared to even die. For the Angel's sake... just do something. Something, kid... please..."

Alphys' cell was unrecognizable from how it had appeared just hours ago. She'd been allowed paper and access to the Royal Scientists' notes under the condition that she used it to help work on the quandary that currently befell them, but her frantic scribbles had used up dozens of pens and pencils along with every sheet of paper she had access to in a matter of hours. Too impatient to wait for more, she'd begun scribbling on the walls instead, first with her remaining writing implements, but eventually with a claw scraping shapes into the brick when those had failed. Now, she was four claws deep, the first three scratched down into jagged nubs occasionally sloughing off scattered dust particles. 

Outside of her cell, Unkyl, the Shield of Justice, could only watch on with utter incomprehension. Her pace was absolutely maddened, and though his job was theoretically to prevent her from escaping, it had been reduced primarily to passing her new writing implements and pages when they arrived, as they did now.

"Doctor, I-"

"Thank you," Alphys snapped, snatching a new handful of folders and pens, "I was going to have to move to ceiling space, the floors are too full of things I need to see to start using them."

"Is there anything else that you-"

"Get Sans," she replied instantly, "I need his eyes on some of these things."

"I can't," he replied. "You two aren't permitted to be together yet, and besides, I'm told that he's openly refused to help."

Alphys hissed. "Then get me that girl who lives by the river, the one who Gaster turned down. She was his third choice, she'll be better than useless."

Unkyl wavered for a moment, then nodded to the one who'd brought the supplies, confirming the order.

"Alphys, I understand you're busy, but-"

"I'm focused," she interrupted, "and I'm making progress. If you want to chat, talk to Sans, and while you're at it, tell him he can go FUCK HIMSELF!" She crushed the paper she was scribbling on in her emotional outburst, unfolding it almost immediately. "I don't have time for this. If anyone can convince him to help, get him. Unless it's him or that other girl, I don't want a word from anyone."

It was, to put it gently, a tricky problem.

The three had been prepared for a great number of scenarios caused by the soul energy extractor. They'd discussed almost every imaginable perturbation of those results beforehand. They'd been ready for it to strip the magic from their very dust, for it to annihilate all information in its vicinity, for it to begin an exponential cycle of energy absorption that resulted in it reaching full power and overloading the CORE's ability to produce energy far ahead of schedule. A hundred different disasters checked and double checked and determined to be within the range of "acceptable risk." In reality, though, they observed several results that weren't even remotely within the realm of their expectations.

First, a physical vacuum had been produced. At first, they'd guessed that it was a consequence of them machine drawing out Sans' magic, but Alphys' calculations and observations immediately after the disaster confirmed that couldn't have been the only cause. The sealed section of the CORE in which the experiment was carried out was breached once, for 4.7 seconds, by Madjick. Considering that and the air pressure equalization that could have taken place with the outside of Hotland in that time, the air pressure of the CORE's sealed area after the experiment was much too low- there were no two ways around it, air had been actively consumed by the chain reaction somehow, despite the fact that the extractor had no capacity to absorb any material with mass and no ability to store that material, either. 

Next, and second least explicable, the light readings in the room had read negative. Not zero, but negative, as though the extractor were somehow capable of removing even light that wasn't there. Light that wasn't affected by the Extractor beamed into the experiment area and did not increase visibility in the slightest, since even after the additional light added by the magical lighting in the room, the photon levels only went from deep in the negatives to slightly less deep, producing no visual change. The blackness was literally impenetrable, a state of affairs impossible under non-magical science and with no precedent in magical science either, nor even in mystical magic used by old-fashioned types like Madjick. 

Finally, and most impossible to explain, the area where the extractor once was and where Gaster and Chara fell into now erupted with a continuous fountain of impenetrable black smoke. The smoke itself was easily permeable, but any attempt to enter it was rejected as though by a sentient force. Inanimate objects could enter with perfect ease and would simply never return, but magic and monsters alike would either be muffled to the point of nonexistence or forced back out of the terrible miasma, respectively. The smoke was breathable, and did not seem to spread, but it was seemingly impossible to reach any deeper. Additionally, while Alphys described it as "black" in her notes, it would more accurately be described as anti-white, comprised of negative light in every spectrum she'd had time to test for before the King and Queen had arrived.

She was getting somewhere with this. What exactly had happened was a mystery, and what principles had caused it was so far beyond "a mystery" that she couldn't even spectulate, but it all seemed to center on one thing- they'd removed more light from the environment than was actually there to begin with. This led to one of two conclusions.

1: The atmosphere actually contained more light than originally believed, and regions assumed to be "pitch black" were actually simply just below the level detectable by the eye or any known equipment.

2: Light, fundamentally, was a concept that could be inverted, like charge, and measured into the negatives. 

The second, shockingly, seemed more realistic. She'd need to perform dozens of tests to establish if these "negative light areas" also contained negative energy and other expected effects, but she didn't have time. At the moment, all she could do was make wild guesses and act on the baseless assumption that they were all true. 

No, not baseless. All these were educated guesses, the most likely possible answer. Without time for testing, she just had to rely on her own intelligence and knowledge to make inferences about the problem she was facing. Gaster was gone. Sans was apparently useless. This mess was on her head, and she had to fix it, ideally within the time it would take Chara to die of dehydration assuming they were somehow alive and trapped within that smoke. 

Assuming she really was dealing with a case of negative light, it was impossible to tell how negative it was. All she could test was that its presence removed ambient light, but that meant the amount she was able to measure was exactly how much ambient light there was. Her own magic could produce a radiance of maybe 1,200 candela, but that was nothing compared to even a normal spotlight, and in any case it didn't put a dent in the smoke. If she assumed she could manage much more in an emergency and built some sort of conduit, she could generously make that 12,000, even 24,000, but it wouldn’t matter. Still, the fact remained the light couldn't be infinitely negatively dense, or else it would have infinite negative energy, it would have frozen the entire Underground, not to mention the entire universe if it could make its way through the Barrier. 

Of course it wasn't infinite, how could it be? The extractor couldn't extract infinite light even if there was a limitless amount there to take, (which it seemed like there might be if light really could become negative,) it could only suck up as much as it had the juice to take. Since other non-physical forms of energy such as magic would have had functionally arbitrarily lower maximum bounds of absorption, essentially all of the extractor's output (or perhaps input would be more accurate) would have been dedicated to absorbing light, meaning it just sucked in more and more light up to essentially the same amount it could have even if it had been designed to only absorb light and no other forms of energy.

Well, still, that amount would be huge, but not infinite. Not even close to infinite, actually, it would be a very attainable amount. This wasn't a true void, it was just negative photons, which meant that simply introducing an equal amount of light to the system would cause that light and the anti-photons (no, not anti-photons, since photons shouldn't have an antiparticle, but the, ah, umbrons) and the normal light would mutually annihilate, reducing the net energy and entropy in the universe and violating the second law of thermodynamics. More importantly than a little quibble like that, they wouldn't release any extra energy unlike a normal particle-antiparticle mutual annihilation, and they'd simply cease to exist, unavoidably tearing apart that black smoke and, at least according to Alphys' hunch, undoing whatever currently-unexplainable magical reaction had caused so much matter to be stored in such a small space. In the process, it would free Gaster and Chara, or in the worst case, their dust.

Ah, Chara wouldn't be dust, though. Whatever, at least they'd have it. What did humans do with their remains, anyway? 

"Focus, Alphys. If we're going to get them out, I need to-"

"You can get them out?"

She swiveled around so quickly that she pulled something in her neck, crying out in pain. Next to Unkyl was a weepy-eyed ASRIEL DREEMURR, staring at her with the sort of expression someone might give a cult leader they were begging to heal their best friend's degenerative disease. In a way, she guessed he sort of was.

"P-prince Asriel?"

"You said you could get them out, I... Doctor Alphys, my mom and dad say you messed up bad, but if Chara is really in there, can you get them out?"

"I-I d-d-don't know," she stuttered in shock, "w-we d-d-don't understand a-anything about t-this s-s-situation, and e-even if we undid it..."

How would they undo it? The extractor used the entire power of the CORE, and it was one of Gaster's creations, meaning that obviously it was sacrilegiously efficient, removing almost exactly as much energy as you put into it (if he'd figured out how to make it power itself with the energy it absorbed, it might still be inhaling the entire Underground even now.) The CORE was totally offline, and she wasn't sure she or Sans could get it back up and running in remotely enough time. It was extremely fortunate that the Extractor unavoidably cannibalized its own power source, or they'd be dealing an umbron field probably an order of magnitude denser. Still, even if they got the CORE up and running again in only a few days, they'd need some sort of gigantic laser emitter that would also take far too long to produce, that or a completely impractical density of normal LED spotlights, or an unthinkable density of incandescent bulbs. Even if you added the light production ability of every monster's magic, it would still fall drastically short compared to even a fraction of the CORE's output.

Hotland produced light, too, but not enough, and spread over far too wide an area. All the glowing gems, all the bioluminescent plants, all the old magical lights, they'd all fall drastically short. The only thing that could possibly do it in a short enough time would be the one thing they couldn't possibly-

In an instant, Alphys surged over to the bars, sending piles of scribbled papers flying in the air as she grabbed them like she was magnetized to them, her eyes flashing with sudden certainty. 

"I can get them out! I can get them out in only a few days at most, I just need... sand! All the Underground's sand!" She blinked for a moment as Unkyl gaped in bewilderment. Meanwhile, her sudden move had frightened Asriel into falling on his ass, but he'd gone from scared to entranced the moment he began actually understanding the meaning of his words. "That won't be enough, though... I also need... limestone! That and quartz, and feldspar! As much as we have, as much as we can mine, as fast as we can get it! And I need all of Hotland's monsters, everyone who can resist the lava's heat! That, and I need to get back to my lab! Tell Toriel and Asgore that if they want to punish me, they need to do it after I'm done! I can fix this!"

Chapter Text

"OK. Let's get something straight," Chara narrowed their eyes at Wolfey, not long after leaving the shop. "I've been paying attention and working on some theories, and that last guy, Seam, they made me more sure. We're in the 'Card Kingdom'. We've run into diamonds, hearts, Lancer had a big club on his chest. That little guy was a checker who Gaster beat by playing checkers, and I'm pretty sure all the bugs around here are really tiny puzzle pieces. But then the big thing is Seam- did you say they belonged to Papyrus?"

Gaster nodded. "Yes, Sans brought two broken toys into the lab once, he mentioned his brother had broken them and that he intended to fix them. His choice of "fixing" was odd enough that it stuck in my memory, he simply connected the dinosaur and the vehicle together to make them into one toy. I believe I'm coming to the same conclusion that you are, Chara. It took me a moment, as I am not one for games, but thus far we've been doing battle with cards and game pieces, which I imagine can be found in the break room which Sans and Alphys occasionally make use of."

"And Seam's wheel was broken," Chara nodded, "I bet Papyrus broke them again and Sans brought them back to fix again. So in other words, everything down here is something from the 'light world' brought to life." They turned back to Wolfey, shooting them a cold look. "That's right, right?"

Wolfey whined, taking a step back. "Y-yeah. You two are smart. Everything down here is something that exists up there, but seen through the lens of shadow."

"So why didn't you tell us?" Chara raised an eyebrow. "I genuinely can't figure out why you wouldn't."

"I promise, it wasn't any ill intent!" Wolfey raised his hands in surrender. "I knew you'd figure it out on your own, (just not exactly quite so fast,) and I assumed it would be hard to explain before you'd seen it with your own eyes!"

Gaster frowned. "So after you explained your little legend and gave us your little tutorial, you decided it would simply be wasting too much time to elaborate the nature of this 'dark world' to us?"

"Y... yes?" Wolfey put his hands together, giving a pleasing look. "It's not like it was a secret!"

"So..." Chara squeezed their bottom lip between forefinger and thumb, brows wrinkled. "Your kingdom must be that experiment room, the center of the CORE. All those crazy floating platforms and machines are just various pieces of equipment there. And once we went through the big door, we went into the break room."

Wolfey nodded. "I don't know all of this stuff specifically, but that sounds right."

"So then what're you?" 

Wolfey blushed from his ears to the tip of his snout. "I... I honestly I don't know. I know my purpose here is to serve and guide you, and to maintain ������land. I'm also probably something that belongs to you, Master Chara. I think I know you," he bowed to Chara, "more than you, sir," he bowed to Gaster in turn. "But that's all I can guess. I'm a wolf, a gardener, and your loyal servant. I can only try to piece it together the same as you."

Chara gave Wolfey another suspicious look, but decided to accept that for now. "Well, if you're something of mine, something I had to have had on me when I fell into Gaster's big screwup, then there's really just three candidates. There's my knife, but that can't be it-" they drew the Red Knife- "since that must have become this. There's my locket, which I haven't been able to find since I got here, but you don't really look like a golden locket to me. But you wear that golden flower wreath and you're all about plants, so the last candidate seems good. I have a... golden flower. It fell down from the surface, and mom dried and pressed it so I could keep it with me. I keep it in my pocket all the time." They pointed to Wolfey. "That must be you."

Wolfey smiled broadly. "Wow! That really does make sense! It feels nice to know what I really am... and I'm also happy that my purpose is to give you comfort."

Chara glanced away. "Tsk. It's not like that. It's just a memento."

"Either way, I'm glad we've cleared all that up." Gaster did not for a moment look like someone who felt like things were cleared up. "But we should continue ahead. Regardless of our enemies being regular objects (and quite weak,) they can harm us all the same. We should keep making progress."

"Sure," Chara agreed, trying to dig some insight out of his vague expression. Well, he was more suspicious of Wolfey now, but that was an easy one to guess. They couldn't pick out anything else. 

Nowhere to go but ahead.

The soft, dark grass of the Field of Life and Death had now replaced itself with black and white tiles, obviously a chessboard like the one C. Round had come from. Yes, a chessboard and not a checkerboard, because there were seemingly-inanimate statues of chess pieces all about, not to mention the occasional animate piece.

Gaster seemed quite eager to battle them. He'd claimed that he wasn't much for games earlier, but chess, it seemed, was the exception. 

PONMAN - ATK: 8 DEF: 1 MAG: 3 - It's a simple creature, but it knows the rules.

"Queen takes d3, check" Gaster declared smugly, his arms crossed.

"Kf2," the creature buzzed, having been able to communicate only through an odd subvocal hum that was somehow comprehensible as chess notation.

"Rook to f5, checkmate." Gaster cracked four sets of knuckles as this Ponman, as had the others, slinked off in defeat with a comforting pat on the head from Chara.

"How has this not gotten boring to you?" Chara groaned. "Is there seriously no better way to SPARE these things?"

"Not that I can think of," Wolfey bemoaned, "they only ever move forward and only know how to attack and play chess-"

"At a very middling level," Gaster interjected.

"- So I think he's basically got the right idea."

Chara sighed, letting their shoulders droop. "My limit is like four more of them. After that I'm just gonna start chopping, it's not like they even seem to have personalities anyway."

Wolfey nodded. "It's admirable that you haven't been forced to use violence yet, but remember that FIGHTing is always an option. You know now that darkners are just objects. They have personalities and that sort of thing, but they're only actually as valuable as the importance they hold to lightners. If they're more of an inconvenience to you than the opposite, you can always just destroy them."

"See, nothing makes me want to SPARE everyone more than you talking like that, weirdo," Chara narrowed their eyes. "You're a darkner too. Why are you always talking about your kind not being important?"

"We can be important!" Wolfey suddenly became a bit more energetic, putting his hand to his chest. "My role is to guide and protect you, and in the light world, I'm something important to you, I take pride in that! But a darkner isn't like a lightner, we don't have the ability to decide our purpose. We'll always be more fulfilled by serving lightners than anything else. If a darkner truly can't accept that, and only wants to fight you, then it's a mercy to kill them! And besides, the mission is the most important thing, we can't allow interruptions-"

"Like this one," Gaster interrupted. "Come on, there is no use wasting time on a conversation about not wasting time."

"It says, uh- 'From the bottom, the order of the rooms in Card Castle.' Then it says 'of course, you couldn't know that if you haven't been there yet.' And then after that, in really fine print, it says 'really emphasizing this is impossible if you haven't been there.' But like, it's four symbols with only four options, and they probably won't repeat, so that makes..." Chara paused for a moment, thinking.

"24," Gaster answered immediately, "there's only 24 permutations if symbols don't repeat, and 256 if they do. The latter is a bit of a hassle, but the former- hell, I should just do it instead of talking about it, it'll only take about a minute to try them all."

"Lancer is a spade, and his dad is the king, so I bet you should try the ones with spades last first."

"It's hardly a puzzle if you just try all the answers," Wolfey mused with his hands on his hips.

"It's hardly a puzzle anyway," Chara countered, "it's just testing if we've been to the Card Castle."

"Done," Gaster interjected alongside the sound of a wall of spikes retreating. "It was diamond, heart, club, and spade. Good idea, Chara, you saved me perhaps a dozen tries."

"I do my best," Chara gave a small curtsy. "So what'd we unlock?"

Gaster rolled his eyes as he passed by the floor of now-retracted spikes. "A single chest. I could have just skipped the puzzle by sending one of my hands over to open it."

"Eh, it's fine, we learned a little about what's up ahead. What's inside?"

Gaster knelt down to open the chest and cocked his head as he drew out its contents. "It would seem to be a... chunk of twisted metal?" He pulled it out and turned it over in his hands. "It looks completely worthless."

Chara flashed it with their eyes, trying to glean some of their personal insight.

Broken Key C - The backside of a key. If you had the other two parts, you could fix it.

"A key?" Chara cocked an eyebrow. "The backside of a key? Isn't that literally the least useful part? Well, whatever, if we find the other two thirds we can open, ah, something."

"I'm sure we'll figure it out eventually!" Wolfey added, unhelpfully.

"I'll... keep hold of this one," Gaster said, slipping it into one of his suit's many pockets.

The trio had made it nearly to the end of the Great Board when they caught sight of a familiar figure. More accurately, they caught sight of three. 

"Ohoho, little trio!" Lancer pirouetted in place on a white square. "You took so long to catch up to me I thought you had run away from my running away!"

"It was like an hour and a half," Chara squinted.

Behind lancer, one square away from one end of the board, stood good ol' C. Round, kicking its legs whimsically as always. In front of him, between him and the heroes, stood a single Ponman on e7. 

"I see where this is going," Gaster grinned, rubbing his hands together. "Perhaps whatever you have will prove to be a real challenge, dark prince!"

Lancer shifted from one foot to the other like a sumo wrestler, eyes sparkling. "Wow! I've never seen anyone get excited to be thrashed before!"

"I enjoy chess!" Gaster crossed his arms, "and this cavalcade of weaklings who couldn't beat a child ("He's right," said Chara, "I could totally have beaten those guys") have whetted my appetite for a real battle. So what's your next move, Lancer?"

"Iunno," Lancer shrugged, sticking his tongue out, "I don't know how to play checks! I just asked my friends (dad approved) what I should do and they said set it up like this! Honestly, I'm kinda scared being between these guys!"

"Tell the checker to go to the end of the board!" Chara talked out of the corner of their mouth as though they were whispering, despite having yelled to give the advice from across the board.

"Oh, OK!" Lancer pointed at C. Round, the ACTion sending stars flying. The checker shuffled diagonally over to c1, initiating an explosion of light as it underwent its magnificent transformation. Its tiny body expanding into a rounded titan, its legs flexing with sudden hulking muscles.

"Oh dear," Wolfey cringed. "This one looks a little strong."

"Let's see..."

K. Round - ATK: 8 DEF: 3 MAG: 99 - CHECK? The game hasn't even started yet!

Chara blinked, mouth agape. "I feel like this might be a problem."

As though encouraged by its rounded cousin's upward mobility, the Ponman followed suit, sliding forward onto e8. It, too, was enveloped in a blinding white glow. Though it was hard to see through the sparkles and glowing, the little pawn spun, posing as one part of its body after another was transformed by the magical powers of gender transition and coronation. Its plain marble skin was replaced by a flowing also marble dress, and in addition to the killer legs that burst forth to match its new husband's, the new queen had arms to match. When she stood at her full height, she was K. Round's equal in size, probably close to 30 meters tall. She was also, some might argue, more than his match in looks.

KWEENWOMAN - ATK: 99 DEF: 0 ELO: 3500 - You are about to watch Gaster lose at chess.

"Doctor Gaster, I presume!" she cried, giving an elegant curtsy that dropped her height to a mere three his own. "Seeing as you're the rightful heir of that little wolf's little kingdom, I do believe that makes us (very roughly) equal in rank!" She covered her mouth with a hand itself covered by a lace (marble) glove. "Ohohoho! What say you and I settle the score with a battle of wits, then?"

"That would be exceptionally agreeable," Gaster cracked his neck. "I gather you'd prefer to play white."

"Indeed! Convenient, you strike me as someone who prefers black."

"It never goes out of style," Gaster adjusted his suit. "And it does seem quite in vogue down here as well."

"Wow! You guys sure are talking about something!" Lancer gasped, amazed.

"Oh no, Lancer dear, you should..." Kween knelt down and gave Lancer a little push, rolling him off of the board. "You should be careful where you walk dear you'll get stepped on."

"Oh my bad sorry. You look heavy."

She laughed again, nearly sending him flying. "I am."

"So, your majesty," Gaster interjected, "I believe it is your move next."

"Ah right. E4."

"Pawn e6."

"D4."

"Pawn d5." Gaster clicked his tongue and wagged his finger. "A classic French defense. I am well-familiar with this opening."

"Yeah I'm sure. Nc3."

Wolfey and Chara turned to each other and shared a Look.

"Hey, Chara? I don't know how interested you are in this, but if you don't want to listen to Gaster playing chess for the next few minutes, you should close your eyes and just wait till someone says checkmate."

"Knight to f6," Gaster countered, stepping forward onto the board, where K. Round still stood, bouncing up and down with all the enthusiasm it'd had as a smaller and less noble checker.

"Bg5," Kween knelt down and looked Gaster (almost) eye to eye, smugness radiating from her marble features. "Mate in 24."

Gaster scoffed. "Bishop to e7. Don't get too confident against me, it will backfire."

"Dude I'm made of chess. E5."

"Your brothers of the rank-and-file were also made of chess and were also defeated. Knight to d7."

"Which one?"

Gaster blinked. "Of course. Knight from f6 to d7."

"Bxe7."

Gaster raised an eyebrow, bewildered. "A bishop for a pawn? Ah, queen takes back."

"B5."

"Queen to b4, check."

At that moment, K. Round suddenly shot up to its full height, its eyes going wide and an expression of sheer terror (which happened to be identical to the expression it wore at all other times) covering its face. The queen, for her part, had the opposite reaction, merely adopting a miraculously even wider, even smugger grin.

"C3." Immediately, K. Round relaxed, returning to its normal idle pose.

"Queen takes-" Gaster shook his head, "no, I'm sorry, queen to a5."

"Getting befuddled?" Kween asked, cupping her cheeks with the backs of her fingers.

"Well, I confess that you're certainly a more worthy opponent than the pawns I've faced thus far," Gaster huffed, "and playing blindfolded is not especially easy. Still, our positions are even."

("They seriously aren't.")

"JUST MAKE YOUR MOVE," Gaster snapped, grinding his teeth.

"Bd3."

"Hm." Gaster replied, taking longer than before to ruminate on his next move. "C6."

"Oh." Kween sounded almost disappointed. "Are you sure?"

Gaster gaped in shock. "Am I sure? Do not mock me, yes, I am sure!"

"I see..." she frowned. "Nd6 check."

"King to e7."

Rather than announcing her next move, Kween simply moonwalked her way backwards from the edge of the board over to g4.

"Do you mean-"

"Yes I mean."

"Alright. Not a problem. Rook to f8."

"Qxg7."

Gaster grit his teeth. He'd seen that move coming, but he was starting to see what was actually happening, right down to her bishop sacrifice several turns ago. His king was forced into the back rank and trapped in a disorganized pile of pieces that didn't sufficiently protect each other. He needed to open up queenside and actually bring his pieces to bear rather than continuing to be slowly boxed in in the center. "Pawn to c5."

"E2."

"The knight... ah, but you've left the other knight trapped. Queen to b6."

"We don't care about Knights in this house," she scoffed. Again, she merely shuffled herself over to g5. "Check."

"We'll see how you like being threatened. Pawn to f6."

She gasped, putting a hand on her chest. "Don't you worry! For my king, I'd be happy to sacrifice myself! Oh, but, I definitely don't have to. And won't have to, by the way." She took one long stride that carried her all the way up to g7, where she stood on one foot. "Check."

Gaster cringed. At least his rook was defended now, so he could return his king to the relative safety of the back rank. "King to d8."

"Nf4."

"Ah."

"Ah?"

"Ah. Knight to e6 would be checkmate." So much for the safety of the back rank. "King to c7."

"Nxe6. Check, but no mate." She squatted down, resting her cheek on one hand. "Yet."

Gaster was already considering resignation. The position his king was in had gone from suboptimal to completely untenable in only a few moves. There was only one safe square left in its entire range of movement, and she'd forked his rook.

("You're looking for c6")

"Shut up, I know, I'm thinking after that," Gaster groaned. "King to c6. Oh, and You're Looking For F8," his mocking tone was much less effective considering that the context was him getting his ass handed to him. 

"Nxf8," she agreed.

"God damn it," Gaster bemoaned his inevitable loss. His king was completely trapped and he was now down by seven points of material. Well, if he was in an indefensible position, the only move was to attack. "Queen takes b2."

"Castle short."

"Of course." There were no aggressive moves left, and now that she had such a huge material advantage, she didn't need to worry about holding his king in check anymore, she could just mop up his entire position.

"Are you going to make a move?" She asked after a few moments.

"I'm finding the line," Gaster groaned.

"My line?" She teased in response.

"YES," Gaster exclaimed, exasperated, "I am finding your checkmate!"

Chara snapped back to attention like a sleeper agent hearing their codeword.

("Not yet kid," Kween turned in their direction, whispering, "wait till someone says it in bold in a few seconds.")

"God damn it!" Gaster said, "Knight to a6, then knight takes c8, rook takes back, and..."

"Qxd7 check, kb6, rfb1 ("Pinning my queen and king, agh!") nb4, rxb2, rc6, dxc5 check, ka5, cxb4 check-"

"King to a4, queen takes d5, pawn takes e5, queen takes b3... checkmate in 9," Gaster finished her line. "I resign."

"Oh, good!" Kween replied eagerly. "Now I can attack!"

"Wha-"

If Chara and Wolfey's attention hadn't been grabbed by that beautiful compound word Gaster had said a moment ago, signaling the end of that obnoxiously long (it was really only like 3 minutes) game, then it certainly would have been grabbed by the thunderclap sound of Kween taking a single step forward and kicking Gaster directly in the chest with cannonball force, sending him hurtling across four other chessboards and crashing into a Ponman statue which was instantly reduced to rubble. 

"So!" she smiled, cracking her back and returning to her full height, one leg raised in the air prepared to throw out another kick with unearthly force. "Wanna fight for real now?"

Chara wore a manic grin despite the sweat that was instantly running down their face and drew the Red Knife, brandishing it with intent that might have appeared lethal if they weren't up against a marble statue almost six times their size. "Heck, I've been getting tired of all this board game stuff anyway!"

Lancer clapped as Wolfey also nervously took a battle stance, preparing for the first real test of their strength in this world of darkness.

Chapter Text

Well, there was a bit of good news to go with the bad.

For a start, Gaster wasn't dead! He'd gotten absolutely thrashed in one shot, but after Wolfey started bombarding him with friendliness pellets, he slowly started to rise.

Second off, it seemed like Kweenwoman only really put her back into the attacks after successfully landing a checkmate in the chess game itself; she wasn't throwing out those instantaneous, seemingly-unavoidable lethal kicks anymore.

On the overall scale of 'good' to 'bad,' though, things seemed to be leaning at least somewhat in the 'bad' direction.

"Qxc9"

"That's not even on the-"

Chara had been looking forward to getting to use the Red Knife for real, but the experience of trying to block a kick from a 30 foot tall woman using a 20 inch-long sword was making them appreciate the downsides of a weapon that literally reduced their defense, and the experience of actually getting kicked in the face by that very same 30 foot tall woman (who, as though they needed to be reminded, was made of marble) was frankly making them consider swearing off violence altogether.

They spun backwards, head-over-heels, spitting blood and teeth, not to mention probably a few memories of their childhood (and good riddance, right?) They wouldn't have had any chance of catching themselves were it not for the fact that their violently-spinning route off of the chessboard conveniently sent them passing through a few friendliness pellets which swiftly returned their lost blood, smashed teeth, and even those precious memories (damn.)

"Wow," Chara said, spitting blood spilled from vanished wounds, "violently dying is apparently not all it's chalked up to be."

"Actually most people think that sucks," Kween corrected. "Easy mistake to make."

She lifted a knee, blocking the swing of a thorny vine twice Chara's height in thickness and then punting it off in the other direction.

"Actually I lied that mistake is really hard to make are you OK."

"NO," Wolfey screamed, "you almost KNOCKED THEIR HEAD OFF!" He clapped his hands together, firing a burst of much less friendly pellets in her direction. Naturally, she skirted her way five or six squares off to the side and wasn't even particularly close to being hit. "STOP IT! STOP DODGING!! JUST DIE!!!"

"Uh no. I'm worth like 9 points you can't have me."

"I know someone more valuable," Gaster growled from his position on his knees, "do you suppose he might make a friendlier target?"

Kween snapped backwards with horror and noticed that K. Round was currently bouncing around in a great deal of stress with two floating hands trying to pry off his crown with some measure of success.

"Oh, sorry, I forgot to say it," Gaster grinned. "Che-"

His face was embedded back in the pillar he'd been punted into just moments ago, his hands responding by instantly freezing up and then falling to the ground, temporarily inert.

"STOP PASSING OUT!" Chara decided to take out their frustrations with Gaster on the enemy, leaping forward to slash at Kween's back and finally landing a substantial hit while she was distracted. Perhaps the quip had proven to be a tactical error, though, as it was only a split second after their own cut split marble, Kween pulled off a shockingly impressive split (acrobatics.) The impressive part was that she performed it completely vertically, and furthermore that she launched Chara directly into the air like a cannon, this time with most of their injuries mercifully internal. They wouldn't even bleed on their rouge outfit before they got healed, assuming Wolfey didn't get himself thrashed before they even landed.

That seemed possible.

Kween had almost immediately turned to Wolfey to deliver the sort of move that would normally be called an ankle kick, but with her size would probably more accurately described as an "everywhere kick." In practice, though, it wound up being more of a thorn bush kick, as Wolfey desperately managed to put one between himself and her at the last second.

"You are annoying."

"You are WORTHLESS!!!" Wolfey swung his arms with all the energy and gravitas of an orchestra conductor, hurling black and white tiles in every direction as two more vines tore through the ground to try to smash her between them. "You're smart enough to know who the lightners are, and yet you try to fight them!?"

Queen leaped backwards, letting the vines slap against each other harmlessly. "Uh yeah I'm white he's black we're supposed to fight. Plus the king says so."

"The King of Spades is an IDIOT and a TRAITOR!" Wolfey swung his vine from above this time, a move which forced Kween to block by raising her knee above her head to catch it. 

"Actually I meant him-" She pointed at K. Round. "He's mad you cheated in checkers."

"Then I'll kill HIM TOO!" Wolfey yanked back his vine, the thorns catching on Kween's knee and sending her hopping forward, off-balance. 

"That move's illegal you can't move my pieces-"

"YOU'RE NOT FUNNY!" Wolfey bared his claws, covered as they were by their cloth wraps, and the vine he was attacking with burst into many more, each one circling around Kween's arms and torso, twisting and reconnecting on the other side to trap her completely. Still, despite Wolfey's blinding fury and her alleged lack of defense, he couldn't seem to cause any damage just by strangling her. Indeed, it didn't seem like he could even do that for long. With one front kick, she split his vine in two, releasing her and weakening the disconnected half of it enough for her to rip her way out. 

"I think I'm kinda fun-" This time, rather than that ol' stick in the mud Wolfey, it was Chara who interrupted Kween, falling from the sky with a brutal slash that sent her right arm the way of Venus de Milo's, the severed half of the appendage flying off and burying it in newly-upturned earth left by Wolfey's flailings. "How are you fine???"

"I ate a monster candy on my way down!" Chara laughed frantically, coming at Kween with another slash that she avoided by jumping backwards. "You're a good dodger, but not good enough! I'm starting to get it now! You can only do one thing at once!"

"Nuh uh," she replied, "I can move..." she sprinted at Chara with a much less elegant gate than usual, even accounting for the missing arm, "and capture at once!" Her line, like the attack, was rendered immediately ineffective by the appearance of a second instantly-conjured defensive bush in its path. It was rendered immediately counterproductive by a slash from Chara that took off the front half of her entire foot.

"OK you are very annoying."

She swiftly opened distance from Chara, moving mostly balanced back on her heels now that she was missing a healthy few toes. Her next target was Wolfey. His attacks weren't great, but he made it really hard to hit anyone, himself included. 

"Chara!" he shouted, "forgive me, I'm focusing on my own defense! I'm the best one for covering you!" 

"No good!" she countered, smashing straight through the vines that Wolfey had tried to prepare to protect himself, "you haven't got the Two Knights Defense to stop me."

"Both of you are wrong," Gaster somehow found the courage to quip again after getting his face smashed the first two times, "the best one for support is me." 

Kween's eyes went wide as her lunging kick, rather than obliterating Wolfey's stupid face, slid harmlessly into the hole in the center of one of Gaster's floating hands and then emerged very harmfully out of the hole in a second, colliding with her chin.

"And I've got an easy way to stop you." While she was stunned by the force of her own thunderous thighs and stuck awkwardly balancing on one leg with the other hanging in a portal, Gaster repositioned himself to put her between himself and K. Round. "You're a hell of a dodger, but if your precious king is under attack, all you can do is counter! But tied up as you are, that's out of the question! So will you take this next attack?" His remaining five pairs of hands began lining up in a row and roaring with black light, "or will you evade and allow me to discover a quite lethal check?"

"You said it yourself, dummy" she scowled, "we're not in check as long as I'm standing here." She reached up with her one good arm and grabbed the ankle of her foot that was currently sticking out of Gaster's hand. As his eyes went wide with horror, she twisted her entire body as she hurled the entire limb, disconnected as it was from her body, directly at Gaster. For the third time, he'd taken Kween's foot to the face and been slammed directly into a pillar that was, at this rate, more of a pile of once-artistic rubble. "If you keep letting that happen, it'll be a draw by repetition!"

While she was tugging Gaster's now limp hand down her thigh, though, she was interrupted by a double attack, under threat from both the black Rogue and Steward. Wolfey's vines burst from the ground and smashed her torso backwards as Chara stepped in from underneath and sliced the Achilles of her good leg. She punted the human back with her good ankle, sending them rolling again, and gripped the thorny vines in her good arm to keep them from continuing to attack freely, but things were getting rough. A third delivery of friendliness pellets had Gaster rising up yet another time, and her most recent kick hadn't managed to seriously reduce Chara's ability to commit violence.

"STOP!!! Everyone is getting hurt!" Lancer cupped his hands around his mouth to yell with maximal volume. "Don't kill each other!!! This is way too sadry (sad + scary) to watch!"

Kween shot him a bittersweet smile through her grimace of pain. "Sorry, honey, I don't do draws."

"And how DARE you start angling for a draw right when YOUR lady starts losing!" Wolfey barked, blasting a barrage of seeds at her that immediately took root in her cracks, expanding and twisting into full-size vines inside her, vines that sent hairline cracks splintering through her entire marble body. "I didn't hear you yelling mercy when it looked like our asses were getting kicked, you STUPID BRAT-"

"Actually, it kinda seems way worse for you now." Lancer offered as he wiped a tear from his eye. 

Picking up on the sudden sense of danger, Chara dove out of the way just before K. Round landed next to its wife (???) with earthquake force, a burst of stars barely missing the evading Chara but pounding Wolfey and Gaster. Obviously stressed out by the assault on its subordinate (???) it had finally been driven to action, despite obviously increasing the odds that they'd become forked. Truly, this must be love. And, like a true lover, K. Round knew exactly what Kween needed. It conjured up an extremely large carton of milk, floating it up to her marble lips despite the golden flowers and silver thorns that now restricted even her jaw's movement from within. She drank deeply and gratefully. It seemed to be a good move, too, as it would appear calcium had an even more spectacular effect on marble than it did bone.

After just a few great swallows, her entire body seemed to expand by an appreciable fraction and then tremble violently before exploding back into place. Her stony stump burst forth with a new arm, inexplicably wet, and the rest of her cracks suddenly closed, sending thorns and chlorophyl from Wolfey's instantly-crushed vines squirting in every direction.

"Ah, roundie-wowndie! You saved me!" She rejoiced by attempting to throw her arms around K. Round, though as his width was as great as his height, she just barely managed to get her finders to reach his back. 

K. Round said absolutely nothing in a way that sounded a lot like "Nothing is more valuable to me than you, Kweenie Weenie."

With a flash of movement, Kween suddenly swung her arm to intercept a leaping Chara, who'd been trying to drive their Red Knife into K. Round and instead only managed to put it straight through Kween's palm. 

"Your attacks just hurt more every single time did you know that."

"Yeah," Chara responded, spitting blood from the lip she'd split with that most recent heel kick, "it's because you just get less endearing every time." 

Kween just squeezed their hand together, gripping Chara like a toy. The crushing grip was pretty uncomfortable, not least because it smelled strongly of milk (ah, that's why the arm was so wet.) Mostly, though, it was uncomfortable because of the way it threatened to collapse Chara's ribs, and how it was completely preventing them from performing any continued stabbing action.

"Qxc9#." Kween grinned menacingly. 

"LET THEM GO!" Wolfey was obviously running on fumes, but sheer desperation kept him going as he hurled two more vines at Kween. 

"Kay." She responded by baseball chucking Chara right between the vines, forcing Wolfey to desperately retract them so their knifelike thorns wouldn't mutilate the same person he was trying to protect. Instead of being grated, then, Chara, collided directly with Wolfey, sending them both rolling all the way to a1. 

"Man," Chara groaned, "it's lucky you're soft." They took a moment to curse that they'd dropped the Red Knife in Kween's grip, but the entrancing buzz at their hip confirmed it had simply returned itself to its sheath the moment they were separated. Convenient...

"Well," Wolfey quipped back, offering Chara the tiny bit of healing he could still muster, "you're kinda bony, so it evens out."

"Sorry," they huffed, their eyes never leaving direct contact with Kween's, "monster food keeps humans pretty skinny."

Once again, the most powerful piece charged them at high speed, dropping into something like a baseball slide at the last moment. Her hand slid along the ravaged chessboard, going for a grab that would snatch up both of them at once. Chara, not too critically injured, could well have dodged. 

Nah.

Instead, at the moment before they were caught, they drew and hurled the Red Knife- not at Kween, but past her, over her shoulder, directly at K. Round. 

In that moment, a thousand calculations ran through Kween's mind. Almost instantly, she came to a conclusion. She was close enough, and fast enough. She slammed her heel into the ground to arrest her slide at the moment she gripped Wolfey and Chara like a pair of rats in her fist, immediately turning to sprint as fast as when she'd first seemingly instantaneously kicked Gaster into next week at the onset of the fight. She chased the flying knife, outrunning it through the air despite the monstrous force involved in stopping and then reversing her own inertia. Inches before it reached K. Round, she lunged forward with her empty hand (incidentally, the same one that had been stabbed the first time,) taking the blow for him once again. The knife vanished the moment after it struck, returning dutifully to Chara's sheath, but the Kween's Gambit worked, having grabbed both Wolfey and Chara, and all the while avoided direct threat to the-

"GASTER BUSTER!" Ah, good. He remembered not to say a one-liner this time.

A wave of coalesced darkness crashed through Kween's body with a roaring like the sound of a flood rolling down a canyon. The barely-tamed energy ripped through most of her torso and her entire right shoulder, sending Chara and Wolfey falling from a now-amputated marble hand. Wolfey was completely out of gas, but Chara reacted as though they'd expected this the moment it happened, running up the falling forearm before it even hit the ground and leaping into the air, Red Knife raised for the lethal blow against Kween's neck. 

Simultaneously, K. Round once again sensed the attack on its queen within its limited range and began to counter, spinning one of its gigantic thighs into a kick directed straight at the midair Chara. Time seemed to freeze in the moment before the lethal collision, until-

"NOOOOOOO AGAAAAIN!!!!"

Two flying spades pinged off of the Red Knife, ripping it from Chara's grip and sending it off until it reappeared in its sheath. Simultaneously, a matching pair struck K. Round's krown, sending it flying off of his head and rolling off into the dirt. 

Chara landed on the ground without either landing their attack nor being punted into the sky again, struggling to catch their balance as the exhaustion from the past fight seemed to catch them all at once. They still managed to watch out of the corner of their blurry line of sight, though, as K. Round devolved back into its previous form in seconds and immediately wandered away in search of a less intellectually-stimulating game.

"Games for smart people are WAY too dangerous!" Lancer cried. "That was probably cheating, but cheating is good if the game is bad! I have no idea how any of you could possibly have been having any fun!" He clasped his hands to his head in despair. "That was terrible! Terrible! It was like normal fighting except you just said letters and numbers the whole time! So I ended the game! Except if it's cheating and you have to just keep going..."

"No actually," Kween confirmed with her hand on her hip, her torso leaning precariously close to collapsing in on itself, "we were playing the Lancer Chess Variant that whole time. There's a Lancer piece that can take whatever it wants basically whenever ngl the rules are kinda informal. Anyway you took my king so I lose, I resign, and..." she performed a half-curtsy, almost falling in half, "I abdicate. Being queen is hard. I'll leave it to someone more suited to the role."

She winked at you.

"Bye bye." She flipped off her own crown with her (mostly) good hand and, as though it were no big deal, a Ponwoman fell directly from her mouth, landing on the ground and also hopping away, somehow SPAREd. Her main body, in its now pitiful state, simply remained as a statue.

"What..." Chara grimaced, "THE HECK WAS THAT? I was just about to win! Even if I got hit, Gaster would have just blasted her again-" they gestured at Gaster himself, lying near-unconscious after the exertion of firing a ten-hand Gaster Buster, "and even if not THAT, Wolfey could have just healed me up and I would have finished her before she could recover again!" The wildly waved their now-empty hands at Wolfey, kneeling in a field of weeds that were growing all around him, perhaps in anticipation of crowding about his grave.

"I'm sorry," Lancer frowned, obviously ashamed, "it's rude to interfere in a fight you started! And maybe you were gonna win! But I just didn't want anyone to get hurt because of me."

"Lancer," Chara explained, trying to choose the right one of the two Lancers to look at through their now-spinning vision, "sometimes, people get hurt because of you. If they're good people, that's too bad. But you've just got to grab on, dig in, and never give up. Nobody ever gets anywhere without commitment. Maybe you really would have beaten us if you hadn't interfered, but now you'll never know. If you want to get to the absolute, you have to... sorry, I feel kinda... I think I'm gonna..." they fell down onto their ass, cringing as they landed on a hardened block of smashed chessboard and fell over onto their side in the grass instead, "rest my eyes for a second. But I'm gonna explain it all to you... after." 

Chapter Text

"Tch." Chara's eyelids fluttered as too-bright shadows danced over them. "What in the..." 

"Ah," Gaster sounded a bit worse for wear, but mostly just impatient, "you're up. Good."

Chara shook their head and glanced around. It took them a moment to even remember what sort of circumstances they were in, and a moment more to start trying to untangle where exactly they were now. It would seem they were in the midst of a clearing in some sort of forest, lying on a hammock and... being fanned by a giant leaf? Held by one of those diamond monsters, Rudinn- they squinted up into its shimmering eyes.

RUDINN - It feels bad that its coworkers are being forced to fan the lightners, but this is actually its passion.

"Eh?" Chara glanced around some more and realized there were actually four hammocks here. Two were empty (albeit still manned by one leaf-holding Rudinn each, evidently taking their breaks) and the third held one W. D. Gaster, sitting in it with his legs crossed and his heel touching the ground. 

"What in the heck happened?" 

"Well, after we-"

"CHARA!" Two voices simultaneously called out in excitement and relief. Chara's eyes raised to meet Wolfey and Lancer, both entering the little clearing full of hammocks carrying a plastic grocery bag full of somethings. The bags were almost completely forgotten as they both rushed to either side of Chara. Lancer bounced to their left while Wolfey rotated over to the right.

"Goshness goodness," Lancer energetically yelled, "you were asleep for so long I thought you might wake up way sooner than you did! You're a slow sleeper!"

Wolfey almost wheezed in relief. "Even after I healed you, you were out for like... I mean..."

"It was about two and a half hours," Gaster rolled his eyes at the overreaction. "I told them, while exhaustion is easily remedied by food or healing magic for monsters (and apparently darkners as well,) you humans have your biomechanical necessities. I'm frankly surprised you didn't just sleep a full seven or ten hours after that level of exertion."

"I usually just nap a few times a day," Chara scratched their head. "There's not much 'day' or 'night' underground."

"Two hours... isn't really much, I guess..." Wolfey's shoulders sagged. His expression didn't match his body language; it seemed from his face that he was, in fact, in a pretty good mood. "I just got nervous when healing didn't get you up. You weren't dead, but..."

"Sleeping too long is the first symptom of deadness," Lancer nodded with confidence in his sage wisdom.

"Hold on," Chara rubbed their eyes and sat up, "what happened while I was out? Why are you guys friends now?"

"Oh!" Lancer brightened, "we're not! This guy is the worst!" 

"Yeah," Wolfey frowned, "I'd never befriend a darkner who'd truly endangered lightners. That said, he did us a favor, so I haven't killed him."

"Plus, tallboy told him to be nice to me!" Lancer helpfully explained before putting on a more pensive expression. "He seems to be pretty bad at that, though."

"Yes," Gaster confirmed, "after the battle with that terrible queen, all three of us were more-or-less incapacitated. Lancer ordered his men to deliver us to a place we could receive some R&R ("rhammocks and rsnacks!") and we were brought here, where Wolfey and I swiftly recovered once we'd eaten. Speaking of, I believe that bag is for you."

"Oh, yes yes yes!" Lancer bounced back to where he'd forgotten his sack, "me and dirtboy made a bet that whichever one of us was wrong about which food you prefer would DIE."

"Would pay the other 100 D$," Gaster corrected.

"Aw," Lancer pouted, "fiiiine."

Wolfey huffed in disappointment. "We had an easy out there, Gaster, since I know full well what Chara's favorite food is already, so of course I'll win!"

He called a vine to pull his bag over to him and pass it to Chara, while Lancer tossed his up into the hammock. Chara shook them both. Lancer's was heavier and full of something with a bit of give, whereas Wolfey's was stuffed with smaller, lighter, harder objects. They popped one out of Wolfey's bag first. 

Choco Diamond - Restores HP - It was expensive, but getting Swiss chocolates down here is a feat in and of itself.

Oh! It was one of those individually-wrapped chocolates that you usually only see in gift boxes and the like. Chara's mouth was instantly watering just at the sight of the packaging, and they tore it open impatiently without even looking at Lancer's choice first. The chocolate disappeared into their mouth like it had flown there of its own volition, and they didn't hide their delight as they swapped it from one side of their mouth to the other, slowly letting the fine chocolate melt and savoring every minute flavor. What a treat for a sense, this sort of thing was to the tongue what fine sakuga was to the eyes. Delightful. 

Chara was biased towards making Lancer win in any given contest between him and Wolfey, mostly because seeing him sad was sad whereas seeing Wolfey embarrassed was amusing, but Chara doubted they could even lie about whatever Lancer had being better than that. "Well, Wolfey, you're right, chocolate is my favorite (though I also can't get enough of a good butterscotch pie,) buuut..." they glanced down to Lancer, who was shuffling from one foot to the other, anxious about his chances. "I'll give yours a fair shot too, kid."

Lancer brightened a bit. "Well, you might like chocolate, but you are a they after my own spade! And that means I know for a fact you must know the tastiest things are the gooiest things!" 

Chara smirked, reaching into the bag Lancer had provided and retrieving a heart-shaped filled donut. It was nice and warm, and they could indeed feel the sloshing of something more liquid than your average donut filling inside. 

Hearts Donut - Restores HP - How? How!? You were supposed to be dead!

Chara blinked at the odd fantasy that flashed before their eyes as they tried to get a better look at the pastry. It didn't make much sense, it was just a donut, right?

For a moment, in their hands, it was almost like the little snack pulsed.

Chara's breath hitched in their chest. Almost like they were entranced, they brought the donut between their teeth, where it seemed to give another small beat. They chomped down, and instantly their mouth was full of red. The taste, the feeling... it was almost beyond description. The richness, the iron tang, the impossible sweetness that soothed every part of Chara's body and soul. The flavor was almost immediately joined by a strange saltiness, and it took Chara few moments to realize it was the taste of their tears, which flowed freely and shamelessly down their cheeks and to their lips.

They ripped into the donut with reckless abandon, crushing it in their fists before they could even chomp it with their teeth. Filling ran down their face, their chin, covered their entire collar and chest. When they were done with the first they grabbed another, then another, laughing and crying hysterically as they ripped them into shreds with teeth and nail, even drawing the Red Knife almost as a matter of course and using it to skewer them, picking them off of it like a kebab.

"Oh," Wolfey said, staring, "you would like that even more, wouldn't you, Chara?"

It was ten minutes and as many hearts donuts later before they finally stopped, falling out of the hammock and to their knees on the ground. They almost vomited from the sheer overstuffing they'd done, but the butterflies in their stomach were from anything but sickness. They were stained in red almost from head to toe, and as they stood and examined themself in their blade as they had when they first fell down here, they freely wept tears of joy again at the sight. 

"Thank you, Lancer," Chara laughed with shameless ecstasy, "that was a dream come true! You win, obviously!" They couldn't even keep hold of the Red Knife as they leaned back and cackled into the sky at the sheer sensory euphoria of it all.

Lancer, for his part, seemed a bit bewildered, but mostly just very happy about having gone so above and beyond. "Wow! You like ooey gooey stuff even more than my dad, who likes it almost as much as me! And the difference between you and my dad is wider than the gap between him and me, so you probably like it even more than me, too!"

Chara wiped donut filling out of their eyes as their howling slowly reduced to giggling; they didn't even have enough energy for this degree of continuous exuberance. "I guess so, little guy," Chara replied, quieting but still openly giddy.

They plopped a red-stained hand down on his pointy head, mussing up the rubbery nub that might have been hair on a different sort of organism. "Thanks for almost getting my ass kicked earlier. It all worked out in the end." 

Their hand clasped to their face to cover a cheek-straining grin as they turned to Gaster in turn. "Oh my god, doc, we have got to follow this prophecy. Surely, you understand too. If we really can get out by doing what Wolfey says... oh, anything will be worth it."

Gaster, for his part, had watched Chara's outburst silently and without much outward reaction. He had trusted Chara for a while, at least to a certain degree. After all, he trusted Asgore and Toriel, and they trusted them enough to leave them alone with their only son consistently. But it was impossible to pretend that he didn't hold some minor degree of suspicion toward them, if only because of what they were. He was old enough to remember humans being cordial, friendly, even apparently loving to the monsters, only to backstab them the moment they had the opportunity. He would have assumed it was impossible for him to truly trust a human.

But he understood it now. 

"You get it."

His words returned Chara from the thousand-yard stare they were wearing, countless fantasies flashing behind their eyes. Whatever they were imagining had once again caused their cheeks to be awash with tears, and they wiped them again as they turned to face him. 

"I get it. I promise, I get it. Maybe more than you."

He nodded. "Very well. We are in full agreement. Let us free our people."

"Right," Chara said, seeming to come to yet another realization even as they said it. "You are a great partner."

Chapter Text

* Time marches on.

* No one can stop it.

* Not even him.

* The flower is gone again, but something seems a little different this time.

* I hope you forgive him.

* I hope you like him.

* He likes you, I think, even if he has a strange way of showing it.

* He certainly doesn't like me.

* Ah, well. 

* I hope he feels better soon.

* Don't you?

Chapter Text

That had been a life-affirming experience.

Chara was granted a glimpse, however brief, at the smallest imaginable facet of a single brief moment of their ultimate goal. A tiny appetizer, a taste that could have proven sour, could have disappointed in any of many countless ways. Even if it had, they would have driven forward, kept going, kept working, kept hoping, kept dreaming.

But it had been more than they even dared to imagine. One percent of one percent of their true goal and it alone was one of the greatest moments of their entire life. They could hardly imagine the ecstasy of actually doing it. The incomprehensible, incomparable joy of freedom.

It had been ten years. Ten years since they had fallen. Ten years since they had chosen being ripped apart in the jaws of rabid beasts above continuing to live with those demons. Ten years since they learned that love, happiness, comfort, kindness, and mercy truly did exist.

Just not up there.

It would not be another ten years. Chara could not bear such a wait. They had so many promises yet to fulfil, so many wishes yet to come true. Before, they had only partly been sold on Wolfey's claims, but no lie, no falsehood at all, could possibly be hiding in what they had just experienced. It could only be truth. Truth in its purest form. Oh, it was holy.

They wiped tears from their eyes, tears they hadn't even noticed shedding. They stepped forward and knelt in front of Lancer, making direct eye contact with their little savior.

"Hey, kid," they almost choked, "do you wanna be friends now?"

Lancer pouted, breaking his and Chara's locked gazes. "Yeah, but... you guys are scary, and plus, with you being enemies of my dad..."

"That's the trick!" Chara interrupted, placing a hand on one of Lancer's round shoulders and making him slightly flinch. "We don't have to be your dad's enemy. He hates lightners, and we're lightners. Big deal! I've got something to offer him that I bet he'll like way more than killing us." They doffed one of the Runed Shields they were wearing on each arm and then drew the Red Knife, using it to carve a message onto the shield's back side. They then easily folded the shield in two, handing it to Lancer. "Don't read that, OK? It's a message for your dad personally. Give it to him, and I bet he'll agree to be our friends afterwards. You understand?"

Lancer continued to chew the inside of his cheek for a moment but eventually nodded. "OK! I'll bring it to him. But I should know, if we're all gonna make a team together, is it a good team or an evil team?"

Gaster narrowed his eyes. "Yes, Chara, I have a similar question."

Chara stood, licking their lips as they sheathed the Knife. "A good team, of course! We're gonna destroy evil! And because we're gonna get revenge on all the evil people who did bad things to us-" they performed a dramatic flourish before thrusting their thumb into their chest, beaming with pride- "we're gonna be called the Strike Back Squad!"

Gaster sighed. As childish as they still were, Gaster recognized that he and Chara shared the exact same goal. "So be it."

Wolfey smiled a great, sharp-toothed smile.

"OKAY!" Lancer nodded vigorously, holding the folded shield close to his chest. "But I'm not gonna join without my dad's permission, OK?"

"Sure," Chara smirked, patting him on the head, "you can be a part of the Junior Strike Back Squad for now, alright?"

He beamed. "Wow, cool! I've never been part of a junior squad before! I gotta go tell my dad!"

"Just show him that shield and he'll be real proud of you. Good luck, Lancer."

"Today's my lucky day already!" He stuck out his tongue. "It's you guys who'll need good luck! Bye!"

"Bye bye, Lancer," Chara waved as he rushed off, leaving a streak of flames in his wake where his stubby legs ignited the forest's grass.

A few moments of silence passed before Wolfey cleared his throat. "So... you really liked his snack more than mine?"

Chara snorted. "Don't worry, bud. You're right, I really do love chocolate. Lancer just got me something I can't get up above. Not yet, anyway."

"Soon," Gaster nodded.

"Soon," Chara agreed.

CLOVER - ATK: 8 DEF: 2 MAG: 4 - When you live Underground, clubs are basically about as valuable as you'd expect.

"Oh, you guys like sports?" Chara beamed. "I love Captain Tsubasa!" 

"Who the hell is that guy!?" - "Sounds like a cute boy!" - "It could be a girl too?"

"Chara," Gaster rolled his eyes, "why do you expect them to know what anime is?" His hands fanned out in a broad pattern, teleporting Clover's countless flying club attacks to harmlessly smash into the ground. 

"Hey, you condescending asshole! Are girls not allowed to know 'nerd stuff' now?" - "Actually, I love Haikyuu!" - "Personally, I prefer Hanebado..."

"Actually, I thought it was because you're a playing card, but-"

"Oh, great!" Chara huffed, completely interrupting Gaster, "I get it, you guys must only watch that modern seasonal SLOP that Alphys likes. You like sports and anime and sports anime, but you've never even heard of Captain Tsubasa? I can't even blame you, you're actually the victims in this situation, but it still pisses me off."

"Don't get too big-headed! You're condescending to our taste just like the other guy!" - "I wouldn't describe them as slop, personally..." - "I would like to watch the classics sometime..."

"OK, let's all swap subjects!" Wolfey raised his hands. "Sports isn't all you like. I for one can relate to liking trees!" 

"Oh, another guy who thinks he can dictate our conversation topic, huh?" - "Oh, I do like trees, though! What species is your favorite?" - "I like firs..." Clover's three necks twisted together with excitement of several different breeds mingled together. 

"Oh, well I personally like basswood!" Wolfey grinned.

"It's easy to carve," Chara agreed, "but Underground we mostly have pine trees. Pine is almost too soft."

"Good trees shouldn't be cut down or carved! The ideal tree is INVINCIBLE!" - "As long as they're doing good, it's good..." - "I just got a bad premonition." Clover practically tied herselves into knots, continuing to fire off magical projectiles as though it were a matter of course.

"Well," Chara crossed their arms, "we've talked about how I like sports, and how Wolfey likes trees... if Clover's last remaining interest is boys..."

All five heads in the area turned to stare at Gaster. He blinked.

"Wh- why me!?"

All thirteen eyes narrowed, looking closer.

"For a start, 'boys' is just not a word I would feel comfortable using even if it was my interest! And besides, I... appreciate the female form!"

"Oh for SURE you do." - "Don't worry, darling, we all like boys here!" - "Actually, doc, I'm with you..."

"Ah, give me a break! I'm married to my work! Wolfey, plant them an invincible tree!"

"Huh?"

"That's an order!"

"Y-yes sir!" Wolfey threw a seed into the ground and thrust his arms into the air, coaxing it to immediately sprout and grow at a ridiculous pace. In moments, the sprout was a sapling, then the sapling was a pole, then the pole was a full-grown tree, its boughs hanging over the entire battlefield. On another note, the tree's bark seemed to be made completely of shiny metal. "I can't do 'indestructible,' but that's pretty good, right? Right?" Wolfey was sweating like a dog, in the sense that dogs can't sweat.

"Trees aren't made of metal, idiot!" - "But it's the thought that counts!" - "I think it's pretty good actually." Clover wandered over to the tree and began using the tree as a scratching post to sharpen her front claws and tail. 

"So," Chara sighed, a bit disappointed they hadn't been able to tease Gaster any further, "are you satisfied?"

"That guy wasn't my type anyway!" - "Yeah, and this tree is pretty cool!" - "(That means you can spare us.)"

"Rad," Chara nodded, sparing them with a wave of their hand. "Let's keep going!"

STARWALKER - ATK: 5 DEF: 5 MAG: 5 - This enemy seems a little bit derivative.

Chara, Wolfey, and Gaster hustled as fast as Chara's legs could carry them down a long path in the forest, followed close behind by a star-shaped bird that, despite its name, did not seem to be a big fan of walking. On the contrary, it flew high above them, firing down star-shaped projectiles.

"That's Asriel's move, you hack!" Chara shouted up in frustration, though it didn't seem to do much good. "Gaster, can't you shoot that thing down?"

"Not while we're under continuous fire! Surely you can use your ranged attacks, Wolfey!"

"It's too high! I mean, I can try, but I don't think it'll work unless I make a platform or something..."

Chara hissed, though their noise of exasperation was quickly interrupted by a gasp of exhaustion. "Well I, for one, am getting tired, so we're gonna need to make ourselves some cover and then-" they blinked, noticing the bare scenery they were running through interrupted by a seemingly free-standing bell just off the path a ways ahead of them. "Hold on, Wolfey, get ready to surround us in vines for cover, but don't do it yet. I just came up with a really good joke."

"Got it, master Chara!"

"Oh, goodie golly gee," Gaster rolled his eyes, "I hope it is at least a quick one."

"It will be it will be it's really good," Chara wheezed as they approached the limits of their cardio. Once they reached the bell, they skirted to a stop, hands on knees as they gasped for breath. "Wolfey, a dome, please!" 

Cooperative as always, Wolfey waved his arms, conjuring vines to burst from the ground and form a protective circle around them, tight enough to block the Starwalker's stars without completely trapping them in darkness. "Is this where you wanted to do the joke?"

"Yeah..." Chara gasped, holding up one finger to request the others give them a second, "but just... I mean... just wait a little bit."

Gaster narrowed his eyes. "If you wanted to take a break from fleeing, we could have just done that. And for the record, your endurance needs work."

"Humans need protein to build muscle strength!" Chara complained, "don't blame me for being out of shape! Anyway shut up shut up check this out." They took one last deep breath, centering themselves and puffing out their chest. "BEHOLD!" They gestured out of a crack in the vines towards the Starwalker now ominously circling their sanctuary of plant matter- "A wing!" They turned towards the bell, giving the clapper a good kick to send it pinging about on the inside of the inexplicably-located instrument, "a ding!" they thrust both hands out towards the deeply-unamused doctor, "and a Gaster!" 

The named one stared at Chara through eyes so thin as to be essentially completely closed. "Ah. Good one. That is indeed my name. Shall we try to find some way to actually solve the problem at hand now?"

"Actually," Wolfey spoke up, "the bell actually did it."

Chara and Gaster both turned towards him, eyebrows raised. "Huh?"

"Yeah look as soon as it heard the bell it walked away."

Sure enough, the thing had immediately landed and gone wandering off on foot. Star walking, for once.

"Huh."

"Yes, ah..." Gaster blinked. "Well, Wolfey, do you have any idea why that happened?"

"Nope. I just take care of the place."

"I did not figure you would," Chara said. "Whatever, let's just... get out of here."

Wolfey awkwardly wilted his vines. "You guys have got an odd sort of relationship, don't you?" The question came seemingly apropos of nothing.

"Would you believe we had barely spoken before now?"

"Yeah," Chara seconded, "I was seriously not expecting to take so long hanging out with this old guy. Honestly, Wolfey, I'm glad you're here, it'd be weirder if it was one-on-one this whole time."

"Awww," Wolfey's eyes went wide with gratitude, "that's so nice of you to say!"

Chara squinted, but refrained from further comment, simply moving on and stepping out of the clearing, back to more of the forest's normal twists and turns. The moment their foot stepped off the path that the bird had followed them down, however, they shuddered. "I feel like I've forgotten something important."

"Yes," Gaster agreed. "We must turn back a moment."

The two immediately turned on their heels to Wolfey's bewilderment. "See, this is what I mean! You guys are bickering all the time, but then you immediately fall into lock-step without warning!"

"Probably because we're both pretty smart," Chara waggled their finger with a sense of poorly-hidden pride, "we just come to the same conclusion when there's clearly a right answer."

Wolfey gasped and nodded with understanding. "That's you lightners for you... no need for conflict between you guys."

Neither of them dignified that comment with a response, instead returning back to the path they'd just fled down. The bird reappeared, but Chara quickly rang the bell and it fled just as immediately as before. Chara continued wandering down the path, eventually spotting what they at first assumed was the Starwalker that had attacked them before, but- this one was different, somehow. They wandered over and squinted at it.

The Original Starwalker - LV 5 Trailblazer
He walked so those who came after could also                  walk. 
HP: 55/55 ATK: 55 DEF: 55 MAG: 55
Weapon: The Original Hands - Pray he never has to use them. + ORIGINALITY ++ COOLNESS
Armor: The Original Feet - These feet were made for walking. + ORIGINALITY + STAMINA
Armor: The Original Attitude - You don't wanna get on this dude's bad side. + ORIGINALITY + INSULT RESISTANCE

"Oh, it's a strong one," Chara put their hands on their hips, "not to mention a weirdo. But it's definitely not the same one as before. Hey," they said, nodding to it, "what's your deal?"

"These birds are Pissing me off," it replied. "I'm the original
Starwalker."

"So true," Chara agreed. "Wanna join our team? Those birds also Pissed me off."

"I will                join." It angrily walked off, apparently having been spared or something. 

"Wow, this sparing thing is really easy," Chara nodded. "I bet you couldn't have managed that, doc." 

Only deafening silence followed. Chara blinked and turned, noticing that Wolfey was also confused. Where the hell had Gaster run off to? He was nowhere in sight. 

"Gaster?" Chara called, hesitatingly.

"Master Gaster!" Wolfey shouted with more volume. No response.

"Did he get snatched!?" Chara looked around frantically, "in the last like 30 seconds? Did he just wander off? Scientists don't just wander off, do they?"

"What if he found some science to do!?" Wolfey's eyes went wide, "science takes forever! He could be gone for months! Golly gee we gotta find this guy!"

"Golly gee?" Chara briefly snapped out of their panic before returning to it almost immediately. "Never mind that! You're right, we have got to find him quick, before whoever took him can do any more damage!" Without another word, Chara sprinted off into the depths of the forest. 

Wolfey stared after them in total shock. Was that not EXACTLY the best way to get hopelessly lost and separated? He was mistaken, of course, as the best way to get separated is actually to watch your companion run off into the woods slack-jawed without following behind. Swiftly, Wolfey seemed to come to that same conclusion, following as quickly as he could. Thankfully, he knew he was much faster on his feet than Chara, at least over long distances, but it was still a struggle to follow them as they ducked and dove through the woods.

It was some minutes before Wolfey finally caught up, and only then because Chara stopped all on their own, panting as they sat on the ground, leaning on a red chest. "I got tired," they said, "and distracted again. Check it out, I found a random chest out here." They waggled the small metal object they'd pulled out of it.

Broken Key B- The teeth of a key. Actually the most important part this time.

"I'm guessing it's just a third one left we have to find before we can unlock something. Anyway I give up finding Gaster, he'll wander his way home eventually."

Wolfey rubbed his eyes as though something would be different once he'd cleared them up. "Are you sure???"

"Pretty sure," Chara shrugged. "I felt a pull to run off in this direction, but it turns out it was towards this chest and not towards him, so who knows where he actually ran off to. It's not like we can search the whole forest. Anything could get lost out in these trees, and you'd never, ever find it. I say we should just go back to the path, if he knows we're separated that's where he'll go next."

"Alright," Wolfey cringed, chewing a claw. 

On the way back to the path, the pair moved slower, allowing Wolfey to order the trees out of they way as they progressed. He also kept his nose peeled for any signs of Gaster's scent, but he couldn't detect it from anywhere except the path he'd already crossed.

"Oh look he's back."

Wolfey snapped out of his sniffing to follow Chara's gaze back to the path that they'd run off from, the one with the starwalkers, where indeed Gaster stood, wide-eyed and seemingly confused.

"Hey, doc! Where the heck did you run off to?"

"Nowhere," Gaster replied as Chara reached his side.

"Nowhere? What are you talking about, you basically vanished into thin air. Did you teleport away or something."

"No, I... I didn't go anywhere. I just stepped around the corner."

"And you didn't hear me yelling, you self-absorbed..." Chara frowned as their insult trailed off. Was this guy actually OK?

"No. I didn't hear anything."

"Well, uh... are you OK?"

Gaster brought one of his hands to his mouth and coughed. "Yes. Yes, I'm alright. Nothing happened. No one was there. We should move on."

"Yeah," Chara agreed. "I think we should."

Chapter Text

"That whole... interjection killed enough time," Chara eventually said as the group walked along the bird-haunted path for a third time (the bird had tried to harass them again, too, but Gaster had sent a hand up ahead to ring the bell.) "The King's definitely gotten my message by now. If he's in agreement with my deal, then he'll greet us as guests, I'm sure. If he doesn't..." the narrowed their eyes, "it'll still be fine. We're good at fighting, too."

"Master Chara, I..." Wolfey wavered. "I'll follow you and obey you, no matter what. But are you sure that this is the path you want to take? The king doesn't just despise all lightners like you, he's evil! Sewing destruction and discord is his bread and butter! In the trip we've taken through this land, you've seen that very few of our enemies really want to fight, but they're all driven to kill us because of his will! If he was open to diplomacy, he could have sent us messages from the start- I mean, even if he does act like he'll agree to your terms, that may just as well be so he'll betray you! Someone like him has to be killed!"

"I agree that all evidence points to him being our enemy," Gaster interjected, rolling his eyes slightly as though Wolfey's objections had become tiresome, "but your consistent insistence on killing him first and giving our questions to the pile of his dust only makes me agree more that we should speak with him first. I can only assume you agree, Princeps."

Chara grinned. "No. Actually, it's gotten to the point that I totally believe Wolfey on this one. He hates Lightners more than anything, and he'd love nothing more than to arbitrarily cause pain and destruction." Their eyes flashed an even deeper red than usual, delighting in plans they still kept hidden, "that's why I'm sure he'll take the deal."

"Ah," Gaster said, his lips parting slightly in surprise. "So you plan to-" 

"Shhhh," Chara interrupted, waggling a finger in front of their lips, "no spoilers. It's gonna make for a fun scene."

Gaster exhaled sharply, though more in amusement than annoyance. "Very well. I must remind you not to grow too confident. Your plan relies on a prophecy which your plan intends to subvert."

"Nuh uh," they countered, shrugging, "I'm sure you remember that darn prophecy word for word, but I basically remember the gist of it too. All it said was the fountain is bad, not that we have to beat the guy who's guarding it. Technically, the plan's still kosher. And Wolfey," they turned to him, slapping their palm with a thumbs-up, "you said earlier that Darkners we RECRUIT will wind up in ������land, so this place collapsing when we seal its Dark Fountain isn't that huge of a deal. We can make it work out!" 

"I just..." Wolfey grit his teeth. "This is dangerous, you know? This guy is REALLY bad news."

"He would do well not forget that we are 'bad news' as well," Gaster said, though his personal faith in their ability to defeat all of their opponents via violence was reduced since the incident on the Great Board.

The pair walked forward, Wolfey guiding their way through the twists and turns of the forest. He knew much of the route to begin with, and that which he didn't know he could learn about by stretching his awareness into the moss, the grass, the trees, and the vines, revealing the path. The Dark Fountain loomed closer and closer on the horizon until it completely dominated the sky, and as the trees became sparse and the path better-paved, the towering Card Castle came into view. They were here.

"Well," Chara said, the leather on their gloves creaking as they tightened their grip on the hilt of the Red Knife, "I guess this is the moment of truth."

"Indeed." Gaster's hands twiddled anxiously, adjusting his suit in arbitrary ways just to have an excuse to move around. "I suppose we should suggest we come in peace."

"For what it's worth, my powers are weaker indoors," Wolfey admitted. "I can grow plants out of anything, but if it's something tougher than dirt I can't do it quite as quick. I can make vines for attacks, but not to block stuff at the last minute like I can outdoors."

"That just means we were lucky that most of the places we've fought so far were planty areas," Chara said. "It's normal to expect to fight indoors now and again."

"Wait," Gaster cocked his head, "your magic seemed to work fine on the chessboard."

"There's dirt under the chessboard from below, so I just brought it up through the tiles. If we fight on the top floor of the castle, I'll have to grow my vines right out of the stone, which isn't easy. Just- if we have to fight, try to focus on defense. King is no pushover."

"Look sharp," Chara interrupted. As they moved further down the path towards the Castle, several dozen Rudinn had emerged, standing astride the path they were now walking, slowly surrounding them.

"We intend parley with the king!" Gaster shouted. "He should have received a message from us!" He jerked his head towards Chara and urgently whispered, "hand off of your weapon!"

Chara sighed and dropped their hands to hang loosely at their sides. "The old guy is right. We're just here to talk."

"The King wants to know if that one will cause any trouble," called one Rudinn, evidently of a higher rank than the others judging by its incredibly badass spandex suit and helmet. It pointed its sword at Wolfey, though it seemed more of a defensive gesture. Chara took the opportunity to try to glean a bit of information.

RUDINN RANGER - ATK: 4 DEF: 5 MAG: 4 - Resents how few poses it can do with so few limbs.

Wolfey growled under his breath, but nodded. "What they decide is what I'll do. They want to talk with the King, so we'll talk. If he doesn't attack us first, we won't attack either."

"Fine!" It, too, sheathed its sword. "Provided you cooperated, the King has ordered us to deliver you to him. Drop your weapons!"

Gaster and Wolfey just looked at each other, raised their unarmed hands, and shrugged. Chara, for their part, laughed and drew the Red Knife, tossing it into the grass. Of course, as soon as anyone blinked, it was right back in its sheath.

"Collectively, we've got like one weapon," Chara complained, "and that one we literally can't get rid of no matter what. Can we just get away with not drawing our weapons?"

The Ranger scratched its visor in confusion. "Hm. If that's the way it is, that's the way it is. Come along, then."

The squadron of Rudinn closed in around them and held an uncomfortably tight circle as they led them forward, well within range of attacking the Strike Back Squad at their leisure, but they refrained as they led them inside the castle. They made way towards an elevator, but Chara suddenly stopped before they reached it. 

They staggered, grabbing their chest and almost collapsing. Their expression instantly shifted to one of total shock, and beads of sweat formed seemingly instantaneously across their face.

"Chara!?" Wolfey grabbed them by the shoulders in a panic. "Are you alright?"

"I..." Chara blinked, "my heart..." they looked around frantically, as though looking for something they had lost. Eventually, they caught sight of a door tucked into the end of a hallway, seemingly a different elevator than the one they were being led to. "There! There's something important in there!"

"That elevator leads down to the prison," the Ranger explained. "If you'd like to go down there, feel free to continue not cooperating."

"Oh?" Chara grinned through their continued confusion, "is that so? So all I have to do to get down there..." they drew the Red Knife, shakily, "is mess all of you guys up so bad that either I can head down on my own, or you take me where I wanna go anyway?"

"Chara???" Gaster, who had absolutely no clue of what flight of fancy had suddenly caused Chara to start acting so irrationally, was terrified that they were about to be thrown into a fight of ridiculously unfavorable circumstances.

"We're fighting!?" Wolfey raised his hands and the ground rumbled as vines began the process of growing in and through the castle's foundations.

"If they don't let me down there, we're gonna!" Chara brandished their knife threateningly, although the physical fit was ending almost as suddenly as it began. 

A moment before a fight broke out, though, the entire group was interrupted by a sharp sound ringing through the castle's halls; the elevator leading upstairs to the king dinged. As the doors slid open, a voice rumbled out.

"Please, please. If you want to go down there, then our goals intersect more than you know." 

Chara and Gaster both went still instantly. The atmosphere in the room felt like it had turned to concrete.

That voice! Chara wheezed in shock.

This energy! Gaster's shoulders slumped as though his body was trying to bow of its own volition.

It's just like him!

The King of Card Kingdom stepped ponderously out through the elevator, which seemed to barely fit him. "Ah, what bothers you? Don't tell me you're fearful of my appearance alone!" Sure enough, only Wolfey seemed mostly unimpaired, clenching his fists and growling with his ears pinned to his head.

Chara recovered before Gaster. "No, no," they chuckled nervously, "you just remind me of someone I didn't expect."

That great crown. Those broad shoulders. That unbelievable aura of power. Chara couldn't even muster the courage to check his information; in every respect but one he seemed ASGORE's equal. That last regard, of course, was the horrible, malicious energy he emitted with every word.

"Yes, likewise," Gaster managed, still avoiding eye contact. "We mean neither offense to you nor harm to your subordinates."

The enormous King laughed from both mouths, heartily, with the sort of joy restricted to those who lived at the top of the world. "That little quibble is no matter! Dismiss them or slay them, why should I be concerned? After all, though you may be Lightners, and your kind subjects of my disgust-"

"I'm not a Lightner," Wolfey barked, "don't lump me in with them any more than you dare stand eye-to-eye with them!"

He heavily dropped down into a squat, his hands clapping his knees as his jaw hung open wide. "Eh?" he asked, looking between the three of them. "It seems like they're the ones who can't look me in the eye! But you're right, I shouldn't lump in a pathetic slave like you with those who at least try to decide their own fate. But please, please, forgive me! I don't want to be the one ruining our peaceful relationship either!" He let out another terrible laugh, "because you see, I really do like your plan."

Chara, by now, really had developed the courage to stare him in the eye, though their hand was tight against the Red Knife's hilt. "I had a feeling you might."

"The details were a bit limited on the message you had my son bring me, though," King crooned condescendingly, "so please explain... how is it that me helping you will lead to the deaths of more than 99% of Lightners?"

Wolfey recoiled as though physically struck. "What!? What's he talking about, Chara!?"

Chara grinned, frighteningly. Gaster didn't look even a little surprised. Both of those reactions chilled Wolfey's heart.

"There are less than ten thousand monsters in all of the Underground," Chara announced with some substantial spite.

"Just over seven and a half thousand, as of last year," Gaster elaborated.

"Every one of those monsters is precious. I won't let anything happen to them, not by your hand or anyone else's."

King narrowed his eyes. "Seven thousand Lightners is an absurd sum, far in excess of my kingdom's population. How do you imagine you can convince me to spare all of them? Seven thousand must necessarily be more than 1% of all Lightners in existence to begin with."

Chara's grin was so wide as to threaten to split their cheeks into a wound, and yet not the tiniest hint of joy could be seen in their eyes. "You truly cannot even imagine it. The monsters, all of them live within a Barrier, trapped within a wall."

"I know that, of course," King huffed, though it would seem his knowledge of the Light World was less than he'd like to admit.

"Do you know what's outside of it?" Chara prompted.

"Humans, of course," he answered. "Other Lightners, and your enemies." 

"If you knew that, then their plan should have explained itself without further elaboration," said Gaster.

"Wh-" King growled, "you mean that in helping you, I'll be leading to the destruction of the humans? Do you take me for an idiot, or is it you that can't manage simple sums!? If there are 7,500 monsters, and killing all humans would mean killing 99% of Lightners, that would imply the existence of seven hundred and fifty thousand humans! Only an absolute madman would-"

"No," Chara's eyes emitted a simmering hatred of such intensity that even King was given pause. "It's not me who's mad, or even you, I imagine. It's this world that's mad. Because I was born among humans, so I can say with confidence that outside the barrier there live a number of humans that is counted not in the thousands, nor tens of thousands, nor hundreds of thousands, but in the millions."

Even Wolfey seemed a bit shocked by that. "How is there even space in the world for them all?"

"The Light World is unimaginably vast, nearly limitless. Its sheer breadth makes the idea that there would not be room enough for humans and monsters alike a tasteless joke." Gaster spat that last line, his intimidation by now completely forgotten.

"That's where you're wrong," Chara countered, "because I think what we know for sure by now is that the world does not have room for humans."

"But-" Wolfey stammered, "they're Lightners too! And- and you're a human, Chara!" 

Chara snapped towards him, slamming a clawed hand into their chest and almost screaming. "Humanity is a disease! A disease that incites cruelty, violence, selfishness, evil! You can't even imagine what they're like! They're demons, every single one of them. And do you think I'm better? That I'm not cruel, selfish, violent, evil? No," they ground their teeth, veins in their neck visibly engorged from sheer open rage, "I am one of them, down to the filthy meat I'm made of. The only difference is that I know there's something else. Something better. People who care, people who love, people who'd show mercy even to the child of the repulsive demons that murdered and cursed them. I am cruel, cruel enough to want every one of them annihilated. I am violent, violent enough to want to do it with my own hands. I am selfish, selfish enough to want to be the last one of them alive, to experience the joy of knowing that dying will leave them extinct! And I am evil, evil enough to want to side with a tyrant like you if that means improving our odds of butchering every last one of those hateful, vile, offensive animals!" 

Their vitriol left them so impassioned that by the end of their brief speech they were left short of breath, gripping the Red Knife white-knuckled. Even the knife itself seemed to share their zeal for the destruction of humanity, glowing so brightly that its violent crimson aura glowed visibly through its sheath.

"That... and you agree with them, Master Gaster?" Wolfey looked up at Gaster, almost gasping when they saw his face.

His expression was the complete opposite of Chara's. He looked soft, almost grateful, admiring even. "Princeps, I do not know what it is your fellow humans did to you to so thoroughly elucidate you to their nature, but regardless of what you believe of your inherent nature, I assure you you were undeserving of your cruelty. I am glad it was with you that I came here."

Chara turned their head, grinning manically up at Gaster. "My mom, my dad, especially Asriel- I mean, almost all monsters, they're just so kind. So forgiving, so graceful, even after everything- they're just too good to do what needs to be done. But you. You're different. You understand it, don't you?"

"Even I can't hate the way you can, child," Gaster smiled warmly, "but that hatred, it is exactly what we need. I opposed King Asgore's decision to make you his child, and to declare you a potential heir even more, but I think I understand now, truly. You are the future of humans and monsters." He stood straight, staring at the King. "It is as they say. Frankly, even their estimation of the population of humankind is conservative- I believe that even saying that 99.99% of Lightners would be destroyed is a conservative estimate. The prophecy declares that, as we seal the Dark Fountains, the denizens of the dark will escape into the light. With your cooperation, I believe we will be able to destroy or escape the BARRIER, and once that is done, I offer you my guarantee-"

Wolfey took a step back- for the first time, he was beginning to understand the truth of the masters he was born to serve.

"I will take seven human souls. With their power, I will annihilate humanity in its totality, save Princeps Chara. And, as thanks for your cooperation and the reasonableness of Darkners on the whole, I shall use the godlike powers thus bestowed upon me to create a TRUE DARK FOUNTAIN, which shall allow all Darkners to step in their totality into the light. Monsters and Darkners will share the world, and you may experience, with your own eyes, the sight of a world which will astonish you beyond all understanding. I have seen the Light World for many years, and crossed a great portion of its size, but to observe it all in its totality is an impossible task. Still, the wonders which these eyes of mine have seen... I would like to share them almost as much as I would like to take them back for ourselves." 

The King had been silent for a long time, both mouths open wide in surprise at the sheer scale of the Light World, at the depths of Chara's hatred for humanity, at the astonishing promises Gaster had now made.

"I believe you," he eventually said, with a slight tremble in his voice. "I believe the world is as you say. I believe your intentions are as you say. But there is only one thing."

Chara raised an eyebrow. "What?"

"If I were to allow you to seal my kingdom's Fountain, we all would be cast into darkness and obscurity. To even continue to exist, we would rely on you to bring us to this little one's pitiful kingdom," he gestured to Wolfey, "and even if you did so, we would have to live in that pathetic squalor, most unlike the land in which we have lived all our lives, until such a time as your goal was successful. I no longer doubt your intentions, your sincerity is clear in every word. However, I must still doubt your ability to accomplish something so monumental. I had... I had already planned a 'test' for you, to thrust you into a dire battle with all expectation that you would be slain. But now... I believe it is possible. If you wish me to willingly surrender my kingdom, do this one thing. If you cannot accomplish even that, then I could not possibly hope that you can overturn the order of the world itself."

Chara narrowed their eyes. "And what test is that?"

King had no eyes, but his gaze still drifted slowly towards the elevator door that had previously given Chara such consternation. "It is a simple task, but no easy one."

"Just say it," Wolfey moaned in resignation, his shoulders slumped.

"Kill The Clown."