After calling Asmodeus and Alphys, Frisk and Asriel put on their bracelets and long johns and rushed downstairs for their snow gear while their parents looked on in silent concern. "Oh, hey, Mom," Frisk said, "make sure you get me a whole bunch of those heart things. I want to put them on a lot of stuff. And remember to get Victoria a snowboard, too. I don't think we'll really have time to go to that hill place today."

"I understand, my daughter," Toriel said, nodding slowly.

"Come here, children," Asgore called, still eating breakfast. "Am I to understand that you intend to place yourselves in harm's way for the benefit of a monster who you did not know existed?"

"Dad, if you're going to say it's dumb..." Asriel started.

Asgore smiled his wide smile, and for a moment Frisk spotted the father/son resemblance even though Asgore had never been a child. "No. It is noble. A trait sorely lacking in this world. These governments may elect, and appoint, and delegate; and others may falsely claim to be elected or crown themselves king; but to be truly royal, you must first be noble, and that begins with making sacrifices to better serve your subjects. Sacrifices of comfort, of convenience... even of safety, should circumstances require it." The doorbell rang. "Go on. You may never be King and Queen, but you are truly Prince and Princess." His children hugged him deeply (right in front of Sans, who said nothing) before answering the door, and of course it was Asmodeus, his sleepy daughter in his arms. He left her with Toriel as the kids got dressed to go out for a walk in the snow.

"Take care, my children," Toriel said as they left.

"So, Frisk, Asriel, what'd you think of the books?" Asmodeus asked. Frisk and Asriel looked at each other in confusion; Papyrus had sent them the books, not... oh, those books. Asmodeus sighed. "You didn't even look at that drive, did you?" he asked, handing Frisk the same one again.

Somewhat embarrassed, the Dreemurr kids shook their heads. "I didn't think I'd have to study to save someone!" Frisk remonstrated, and it sounded silly as soon as she'd said it. "School's coming up, who studies before school starts?" That, too, sounded silly, and Frisk kept her mouth shut while Sans explained to Asmodeus what and where Gaster was.

"Sideways. Not forward or back, sideways." He furrowed his brow. "Frisk, there's only one of us who can go anywhere through these methods. You understand, don't you?"

"I figured it had to be me. It always is. And you're going to tell me I shouldn't go," Frisk said, nodding.

Asmodeus exhaled. He clearly didn't think this was going to end well. "No, I'm saying you should. You have to. We can't leave something, someone, stuck between the teeth of reality like that. Not if he's still able to communicate to here. Sans, you said that he lets you see the future, right?"

"yeah, only, after that thing with frisk's voice, he's been wrong."

"Maybe we're looking at a time loop scenario," Asmodeus said, "and if we don't close that, that might just be it for all of us."

"no kids where dad is, though."

"Then I don't know. I really don't know." He took another slow breath. "Frisk, I wish you had some inkling of the things you were really dealing with here. Where Gaster is can't even be called a place. He's in another dimension, a dimension not of sight and sound but of mind." None of them knew where that was from, and Asmodeus felt very, very old. "There won't be any air to breathe, and a spacesuit won't help. Just the base stuff that makes you, you, won't be there."

"Then why aren't you saying 'don't go, you can't live there'?!"

"Because there isn't anything saying you can't exist, either," Asmodeus explained. "That's what a universe is: a place with rules. Here, if you don't have oxygen, you suffocate and die. There, who knows?" Asmodeus saw the kids' curious faces and sighed again. "Going outside of the universe to deal with an unknown entity? How could a kid like you be scared of something like that? Just the phrase, 'going beyond space and time', sounds like an adventure, doesn't it? If you understood, really understood, you'd be terrified. But for you..." He sighed again. "for you, it's just a game."

Frisk didn't react, but Asriel was visibly offended. "that's uncalled for," Sans said.

"Is it? Is it really?" Asmodeus stopped in front of them, and there was a subtle shift to the way Sans moved. The wizard made a visible effort to control his temper. "Frisk, you do the things you do because you're a kid. You don't have a frame of reference, you don't understand how fundamentally weird, how fundamentally broken this all is, you know how important you are but you still don't really grasp it. You've seen how my daughter is, she doesn't think about how weird, how strange it is to be able to use magic, she just does it. And you, your life was completely turned around, you have a real family now, you don't care if they're not entirely made of matter- that doesn't mean anything to you, like it would an adult. And you figure that since you're helping people, you can do what you want- and, really, that's not wrong. If everything goes right, we really are going to save a lot of lives and a lot of grief, even while you play with whatever you choose. But all our helping hands won't mean anything if this goes poorly."

"you're talking about my dad like he can end the world."

"He's outside the universe," Asmodeus answered, starting to walk again, the others next to him. "As far as I'm concerned that gives him as much power as Chara if not more. And God help us if Chara finds a way to get to him. I mean that literally, by the way; God, if you're listening, please help us if this goes wrong." God did not reply. "Frisk, I can't tell you what to do. Nobody can, and they all know it." Frisk was starting to get the same desperate-worship vibe from Asmodeus as she'd been afraid she'd get in the mall, and she didn't like it one bit. "Don't you understand? Why do you think Toriel just said to be careful? Do you think she wasn't worried? She's your mother, she's worried sick about you, you're about to do something extremely dangerous, but she knows she can't stop you. I can't stop you, and I'm a God damned wizard. If you really, really want to do something, all of us put together can't stop you. Your DETERMINATION, the power of your will, against all of us- and that's a hell of a name, by the way. That's the right human emotion to correspond to it." They continued up the hill, the wind blowing in their faces, and Asriel intuitively huddled closer to Frisk for several reasons. Frisk wondered if Sans, in just his bathrobe and slippers, was cold; but then again, Sans was a skeleton, and since when did skeletons get cold? "If you read what's on that drive you'd understand. Magic is the impingement of desire on reality, and for verbal spells, it's codified. In a perfect universe, emotions would be sent to our souls, entirely one way. Nobody could reach out with desires and make things happen. But we live here instead. And so whatever desires a magical creature has become paramount, given enough power." Frisk and Asriel weren't sure whether all of these things made sense together or Asmodeus was just ranting out of fear. "Sans, what are his desires? What does he want?"

"i don't know."

"Your dad doesn't tell you what he wants?" Asriel asked, amazed.

"he doesn't tell anything. he shows. futures. experiences. sometimes it's easy. sometimes it takes figuring out. sometimes it doesn't make any sense at all."

"Can he see his own future?" Frisk asked.

"'fraid not, kid. he can only see in. he has a hard time seeing himself at all. look. you can't just go in and say 'i wanna save you' and then he'll be saved. he sees you and he sees his ticket back in here, and it doesn't involve you two singing kumbaya."

"You make it sound like I'm not used to people trying to kill me," Frisk said, almost casually. "Maybe it is a game to me. I'm sorry, I can't help it if that's how I see the world. But it's not a game I want to win for myself, it's for your dad and for everybody." They had reached the entrance to the Underground then, and the guard post there had been dismantled once the entire town was guarded.

Hotland and the Lab were no place for kids in snow gear or even warm long johns, and Frisk resolved to wear better clothes next time she came back here. Surprisingly, Alphys was working and not watching anime, although she seemed to be working on an ordinary commercial freezer rather than something more science-y.

"Oh, hello, Asriel, hello, Frisk, hello, Sans, hello, um, I forget your name!" she called. The next part sounded rehearsed: "The next version of your bracelets will be available by the time you get to school, but I won't be able to restore your phone's extra function."

"Extra function?" Asmodeus asked.

"Oh, you mean the box storage!" Frisk remembered. "I totally forgot about that. Yeah, there was some portal thing in the phones. I could put stuff in and take it out."

"The outside world is t-too big," Alphys explained. "It's astronomically easier to fold spacetime when there's s-so much less of it to fold. N-not everything we did here works there. So, ah, what c-can I do you for? Get it? Instead of 'do for you', it's 'do you for', it's a joke."

"Sans, you can tell her now," Frisk suggested, and, reluctantly, the skeleton did, and his lazy speech was interrupted by a lot of gasps and 'oh my' from Alphys.

At one point she looked down at her hands and started to cry. "I didn't bui-i-i-ld it!" she wailed, dropping to her knees. "I-I-I knew I never built the CORE! Why did I ever think I did?" But she recovered quickly, and started talking to Asmodeus and Sans about what Frisk might be able to do to get Gaster back, and Asriel, despite his many, many resets as Flowey, only understood about one word out of three, which was one more than Frisk understood. To her it sounded like every Starfleet engineer to grace one of Gene Roddenberry's teleporter rooms was having a Treknobabble championship, with the prize being the right to toss Wesley Crusher out an airlock.

"Do we need to be here for this?" Frisk asked after a few minutes.

"Apparently not," Asmodeus replied. "Go home and study. Today's homework is to plug in that drive and learn everything you can about DETERMINATION." The Dreemurr kids shared a chuckle. "I'm not joking. The information is there; use it."

Frisk and Asriel walked home, Frisk feeling a slight bit of the worry and fear that every reasonable adult would expect her to. Their mother had, in fact, been worried; she smothered them with hugs as they came back in, even before they took off their snow gear, despite how short of a time they were gone. There were nothing but PNG images on the thumb drive, and Frisk opened up the first; it was just a picture of the book's cover, which was uninspiringly titled "How to Use Magick". She'd expected something with a bit more pizazz, like "The Necronomicon" or "The King in Yellow" or maybe "How to Break Reality for Fun and Profit Without Really Trying", and she wondered how many people would buy a nonfiction book with that title. All of them, probably.

The second image was the first page, and there was none of the introductory material that precedes modern books, the author's name signed loosely at the top. "What language is this?" Frisk asked, staring at the unfamiliar script. She hadn't realized that Asmodeus had a jokey side; he'd apparently handed her something written in Arabic!

Asriel laughed. "It's English, it's just really, really old." Asriel hadn't seen cursive since before he became a flower, and he closed his eyes briefly, trying not to let the memories hurt him. Opening them, he pointed to the text, his soft finger brushing against the screen. "Here, it says, and it uses a lot of capital letters since that's what they did back then, Magick- with a K- is the Impingement of Will upon Reality. It talks about emotions, and minds, and mental states, and all kinds of weird stuff. Frisk, I'm not sure if all of this is true."

"If it's just the intro, skip ahead, try to find where it talks about time travel. It's not going to say DETERMINATION because that's not what they called it back then."

"Okay, The Mind Drives The Mass, we know all this stuff, it's what I can just do, here we go, Syllables, Their Meanings And Use." He opened up several images in turn, trying to get a handle on something, as Frisk stared at the relevant text, trying to pick out English letters from the strange, flowing script. "Sorry. I can't even read most of this, and I'm afraid to even say these to see if I can pronounce them right."

"There's really no way to say these by mistake, is there?" Frisk asked.

"Maybe if you choked on something while snorting milk up your nose and doing a p-b-b-b-b-t with your tongue at the same time? I don't even understand these words. What's a 'fricative ululation'?"

"Are you sure you're reading that right?"

"I think so? That's what it says, I don't know what it means."

"Just try to find something descriptive, what it is, what it does kind of stuff. Oh, yeah, look in the back, try to find an index." There wasn't one, and the two of them hunted down all the meaning they could find. After more than an hour (with a brief sojourn for the breakfast they'd had 'yesterday'), flipping through multiple books to find something, anything, of any use that they could understand, Frisk had nothing but a headache. There were a couple of things with the word "time" in them but Frisk couldn't puzzle them out despite her iron determination. Frisk had heard of stories that involved someone going insane by understanding the contents of books, but she decided it was the other way around; it was not being able to understand that brought confusion, rage, and madness. These particular books were like reading a college-level chemistry text written by alchemists three centuries ago, and the authors' handwriting wasn't the greatest, and they didn't organize things the same way (one of the books was just a collection of essays), and try as he might Asriel couldn't remember the near-Shakespearian terms these people used.

"Why are we even doing this?" Frisk eventually asked, annoyed. "We're not getting anything, we're not learning anything. We can't even find what he's talking about." She couldn't believe he'd be dumb enough to do this to her. Either she was being intentionally trolled- and there was no way he'd be dumb enough to do that- or he was dumb enough to believe that anyone could immediately grasp a subject that he'd been studying for a lifetime.

"I'm glad you said it," Asriel replied. "I thought maybe you were putting it together while I couldn't figure it out."

"No! How could you think that? I can't learn anything by randomly flipping through books trying to find something I understand! That's why it's called teaching. You can't just throw books like this at people and say 'go learn,' we don't even know what these words mean. We've never done anything like this before except the simplest stuff, this isn't even science. Maybe if we read through the whole book really, really slowly, we might figure something out, but that'd take years. Where's his notes? Didn't he take notes?" Frisk reached for her phone.

"He might be busy," Asriel pointed out.

"It's just one question," Frisk replied, dialing the wizard with a few button presses. He picked up right away. "Asmodeus! We've been trying to learn how to hack existence, but we need the Cliff's Notes! Didn't you take any?!"

"...No?" he replied, slightly confused. "I didn't say you should read the whole thing, I just said find the right ones so you know more about what we're doing."

"I'm so glad you're not going to be a teacher at our school," Frisk replied. "Did you ever bother copying any of this stuff down into readable modern English?!"

Asriel held up two fingers and Frisk rolled her eyes at him: Fine, it's not just one question.

Asmodeus sighed. "I should have known it would be a little obtuse. Never mind, then. I suppose I'll add some explanations in the future."

"Try getting someone to copy it so it's not cursive, not full of words nobody uses anymore, and with a lot less old-timey fake-chemistry mumbo-jumbo in it!" Low on sleep and patience, Frisk angrily hung up when Asmodeus didn't reply right away. "You'd think if his daughter can cast the stuff he'd at least have translated some of it."

"Maybe that's why he didn't," Asriel suggested. "He doesn't want her using stuff that might hurt her."

"I might have said this before, but if someone's trying to get kids not to know things then he really shouldn't be a teacher," Frisk grumbled. "We woke up way too early, let's go back to bed." Asriel agreed immediately, and they barely remembered to take off their bracelets before sleeping next to each other in their long-johns. Frisk wondered why it was so hard to understand magic when the effects were so simple. The goat's fur was wonderfully fuzzy and soft, she could feel his warmth against her cheek as they nuzzled together, why didn't she understand what made her brother what he was? Even if the crud in those books was cleared up, all the words that she couldn't grasp and all the antiquated belief crap of people long dead, she knew it'd still be a challenge. Why would that be, though? Asriel was magic, and there wasn't anything so terribly complicated about him, any more than Frisk herself... but that was wrong. "I think I know a little more of what it's like to be you," Frisk said under the blankets, and Asriel gave an inquisitive bleat. "You sense all the cells running around inside me, and neither one of us knows what they all do. I'm reading a book about what makes magic work, but we don't understand it. Humans don't know everything about how humans work. I didn't think it'd be the same for you."

"I do know how I work, Frisk," Asriel replied. "But I don't know it in your words, I know it in my own. Humans, you have so little control over your own bodies. And that scares me sometimes, because you can't stop yourselves from getting really bad stuff inside you and not being able to get it out. He's right, I need to do medicine. Not just for everyone else, but so if something bad gets into you, I can get it out. Stuff that's so small you can't even see it, can hurt you." Frisk felt him shudder. "That's scary."

Frisk chuckled. "Az, I promise I won't die of Ebola or malaria or flying pig disease or swamp sewer crotch rot."

"Wait, how do you get swamp sewer crotch rot?!"

Frisk started laughing. "In a sewer in a swamp, I guess. I just made that up!" Asriel laughed giddily, and Frisk caught his laughter like a disease until the two of them fell asleep.

While Frisk and Asriel slept, ten heavily armed and armored SWAT members shot tear gas canisters through the windows of a suburban house in Columbia, Maryland before kicking down the door. Both of the terrorists who had spent the last few days in absolute secrecy building a car bomb were overwhelmed immediately, hauled out in plastic cuffs while other police secured their weapons and explosives. "How did you know?" one of them asked, and received no answer. King Asgore would not be attacked that day.

While the Dreemurr kids dreamed gentle dreams, an ambulance arrived at the house of Alice's cousin's fiance's father. The man was told that he was at immediate risk of a severe heart attack and should come with them immediately, and his wife shouted at the EMTs and their Whimsun companion that it was ridiculous, right before her husband, shocked at their arrival, clutched his chest and fell over; the EMTs had anticipated this and immediately started administering thrombolytics and performing CPR while the Whimsun reached in to dissolve the clot. Her other relatives had to restrain her. "How did you know?!" she screamed at everyone, and got no answer. "How in Jesus' name did you know?!" There was only one thing that made sense as an answer, and it was about that one girl on the news...

"Mom's home," Asriel said, waking Frisk up. Toriel had come back from the mall with a giggling Victoria, who Asriel could hear happily rolling around the kitchen. Her father still had his day job making rememberers, and there were a couple of UnderNet (why am I even still on that? At least it's not as bad as Facebook) status updates from Alphys showing that she was working on it. They finally did their morning ritual despite it almost being afternoon. "So, what do you want to do today? In this universe, I mean."

"You want to try to study those books again?" Frisk tentatively asked.

"No!"

"Good, me neither."

Asriel laughed. "Hey, I know what we can do. Well, let's do some snowboarding first, then we can do that stuff we read about."

"Read about where... Oh, that! Yeah!" The Dreemurr kids got ready- this time, Victoria had her own little, pink snowboard- and played outside for hours, carefully snowboarding around trees, refusing to care about the danger they'd face, stopping for a delicious lunch with small portions of candy and fudge. Gaster, I hope you're watching us, if you can even see us now, Frisk thought. That brought up another uncomfortable idea- exactly what could Gaster see? Frisk spent about five seconds thinking of the implications of that before deciding to stop. At least he wasn't human, with a human's desires.

While the three of them played, a man near D.C. carefully shoved a thin bar inside the door of an old car, popping the lock. He didn't know that someone on Trump's Security Council lived only a few blocks away, and wouldn't have cared if he did. As he started work on the ignition, four cops came around from behind corners and rushed him, arresting him quickly. He didn't say anything at all to them, but only one thought dominated his mind: he didn't tell anyone, not even his gang, that he was going to go lift this car, so who could have snitched on him?

Asmodeus came by earlier than expected, as actually casting the spell was very quick, and he briefly stopped to visit his daughter before heading to Alphys. He didn't comment on Frisk and Asriel spending all day playing, which was just as well because Frisk was going to castigate him if he did. Sans honked his horn a couple of hours later, and Frisk stopped to change clothes. She'd need things she could move quickly in; T-shirt, loose overalls (bright red heart affixed in place), roller shoes for a dodging option. Her brother followed suit.

"Where are you going?" Victoria asked as they left her with Toriel, who carefully showed no outward signs of concern.

"We have to save a hidden monster who threw himself out of bounds of everything," Frisk tried to explain. "We're going outside reality for a little while, don't worry, we'll be back."

"Can I come?"

"Sorry, we can't take you with us, it won't work and your dad might get mad," Asriel said, and Victoria started to pout and sniffle. "Hey, c'mon. When you get old enough, you'll probably be able to travel to an alien dimension whenever you want. Well, maybe. I'll try to bring back something for you, but no promises."

"You promise?" she asked anyway.

"No promises, I promise," Asriel replied. They jumped into Sans' car for the brief drive up the hill.

"I HOPE DAD DOESN'T GET MAD AT ME FOR MY POOR CAREER DECISIONS," Papyrus worried.

"Papyrus, you're a lawyer!" Frisk replied.

"I KNOW, DON'T REMIND ME!"

In the Underground, the well-traversed path of New Home behind them, they rolled confidently together to their next adventure. Asmodeus, Frisk thought, had been a little bit right and a little bit wrong. This was not a thing to be taken lightly, but the more she and her brother distanced themselves from fear, the more they could act appropriately. If a thing needed to be done, then the right thing to do was to do it, regardless of perceived risks. Worrying never helped anything.

A deceptively simple-looking machine had been built in the center of Alphys' lab. There was a platform, and tubes going to it from a control panel, and a big red switch, and a startling number of Pocky wrappers, all sorts of other snack food packets, and a lot of empty cans of Monster Energy Coffee scattered around. (Does caffeine even work on monsters? Or does it work on monsters that think it does?) Alphys greeted them nervously, somewhat exhilarated, happy for the chance to try something new. "Oh! There you are. Y-you see, we can create an extra space. Like where Gaster already lives, but made by us. And y-you. S-so we have this beacon, here," she explained, gesturing to something that looked like a cheap plastic toy with six long bits of plastic sticking out of it and clumsily painted with household paint, "and as long as a human is holding onto the beacon, um, you can use it as a way to return. All you have to do is just SAVE to the beacon." SAVE to an object? Frisk ran Checkup (causing four phones in the room to ring) right before a dose of paranoia hit her.

"If I don't come back, who picks up the DETERMINATION I leave behind?" she asked suspiciously.

"I could, or Chara would," Asmodeus answered. "Wait- you think I'm going to betray you?"

"It crossed my mind," Frisk said. She intuitively mistrusted poor teachers. "For the good of the universe, wouldn't you think it'd be better for you to have it? Tell me why you wouldn't."

"Let's... let's just start with 'my daughter would never forgive me' and go from there," he answered, a bit shaken by the demand. "Also, I can't. I physically can't. I won't have time."

"T-th-that's the truth," Alphys sputtered, slinking back.

Frisk nodded. She was loaded with DETERMINATION and SAVEd, focusing on the object in Asmodeus' hands, and found that it worked although it didn't feel like a normal SAVE at all. "It's done." She stood on the platform with her brother.

"I know you won't be able to explain them to us like you want to, but are you absolutely sure that this will work?" Asriel asked. "Frisk can pull us back with this?"

"The theories are mathemagically bulletproof," Asmodeus explained. "Alphys is a natural savant at machinery. For you, it's just a jump to the left."

"Did you just use the word 'mathemagically' because you felt like it?" Asriel asked.

"This job has perks, and that's one of them," the wizard replied.

"Ooh, then do I get to say it? This device will work perfectly, and absolutely nothing will go wrong," Asriel said confidently.

"Az!" Frisk shouted.

Asriel's grin widened as he tempted fate some more. "Flip the switch at any time, Alphys, the device is perfect and requires no extra checking. Unforeseen consequences aren't going to happen. We can rest assured that everything will be fine."

"Daijobu," Alphys said, one of her favorite words.

"Let's just focus on," Asmodeus was saying, and then the Dreemurr kids were in the same place as they had just been. The equipment Alphys had used to send them here was missing, as were all the spare parts and all the mess Alphys left lying around. The conveyor belt wasn't moving, and the screen was blank, and there was a grainy, blurry texture to everything, as if they were watching the world thr%ugh several takes of an old film. Asriel held his ears briefly, wincing, but what he was hearing was not sound. Frisk suddenly reali[ed that she couldn't feel her own body- shocked, she waved her hand in front of her face, and found that she could move freely and quickly, but it was as if she ^as waving a stick, her proprioception gone. She felt neither vertigo nor gravity, sensation nor numbness. Are we even really here? Or are our bodies just back there while we dream? She spun around slowly, trying to get an idea of what this place was like, and as she spun what she th_ught was a full turn, all the way around she wasn't looking at the same spot in the lab, and in startl(ment she immediately spun back around until she could see her brother again. "Az! Did I disappear?"

"No, I just saw you spinning. But, when you did, you weren't... going around?" He tried the same thing, and Frisk watched him spin 360 de[rees yet she only s(w his back, and he immediately spun back around as Frisk had. "Okay, this place is really, really we{rd, let's just find him and go."

"This place is really what?"

"Weird. It's like something's messing with us."

"It's not that thing, is it?" Frisk asked, pointing. On the far side of the lab, a six-inch-wide nothing slowly rip?ed a strip, just as wide as itself, out of the wall, having already ripped out many more, and, reaching some predetermined end, moved down to do it again, totally unconcerned with Frisk. On the other side of the portion it had e_ten away was nothing, nothing at all, and Frisk wondered how muc* volume this space really was and had a wild series of thoughts: Are all of Alphys' anime DVDs even up there? Would the TV even turn on if I tried? If I turned one on and played it, would it play Mew Mew Kissy Cutie, nothing at all, or something else entirely? She took a brea#h but felt no air intake. Asmodeus was right. That's not air I'm breathing, if I'm even breathing at all. It's magic. By his logic, she should be able to do literally anyth"ng here in this subspace without rules, but she felt it hard just to keep her sanity intact, her brain looking for signs that her body still existed and not finding any, and somethi^g at the back of her mind told her that she was dreaming, and of course she couldn't wake up-

"No, it's not. That's just a garbage collector. I think," Asriel said. Something in the en&ironment scared him and he hug((d his sister, unable to feel her; his awareness faded for a split instant and he blink/d. "The remains of reality, I think. Or maybe the ghost of reality. I don't even think it's alive."

"So what does it eat?" Frisk asked, inspecting it from a safe distance, alth(ugh there wasn't much to look at. It was just a black progress bar moving side to side on a wall.

"No to both, but j#st stay away from it," Asriel replied, holding his si}ter c|ose.

"So what is it, anyway? A minion of so[e kind? It's not dangerous, is it?" Frisk a#ked. Suddenly, she winced, holding her head and trying to re;ember what she'd just said. "Speaking of ghos?s of reality, where's Gaster?"

"He's here, he's right here!" Asriel yelled, and Frisk felt the pre%ence, looking around frantic!lly to see where G&ster was coming from. It's useless, she reali#ed, useless because this lab isn't really a lab and this space isn't r^ally a space-

The slimy black som)thing came out of nowhere, its other side co*nected to emptiness. Frisk reflexively dodg(d, and it whirl$d in the air like a he\icopter, striking nothing it touched, and Azzy scr\amed and someth!ng app*ared halfway in_ide Frisk's l+g and as she jum}ed in ter;or she felt somethi&g run th{ough her back, and sudd#nly a lon\ white sku*l appeared in fr;nt of her and she le^ped out of t%e way &s it b eathed a beam of d?ath-

-and she {anced above a huge ma%e of bone spi;es, le(ping from p\atforms that co|ld not ex%st as anot*er skull cam) out to fi$e its b*ams-

-and she was falli;g sideways th_ough a maze, th=se skeleton heads at ev$ry turn-

-and she was ba^k in the court{oom again but this t#me it was not Juith Saib_ncho but Gas'er himself doing the judg$ent and Papyrus was not there, only an endless wave of ga)ter%lasters coming through th; walls-

-and she was phy^ically in(ide the Lego sc}ool she had made, but all the ri?iculous sentry guns we-e gasterblasters with w*nd-angle b#ams-

"St#p it!" she sc$eam)d. "W['re t;ying to s$ve you!" B't she d,dn't even k%ow if t#e t'ing att%cking her had r)ason, or even knew it w[s atta|king, the th/ngs pa^sing thro$gh her seem-d to w(nt som"thing i]side her body or m#ybe so*ething insi*e h(r he!d, wh%ch wa* pou$ding, an$ n#)hing m# e s((se and s(e co**dn't ev*n th##k a(d s/e co& dn't ev#n LO_D beca#s! the(e wa$ no*[ing t} L$&D to-

"GASTER! Cease this battle, and resume your normal form! I, ASRIEL DREEMURR, SON OF KING ASGORE, COMMAND YOU!"

The things passing through Frisk stopped cold, and Frisk jumped away from them, horrified. Gaster's face, a white, cracked mask, slithered out of nowhere. His body followed, and it was amorphous, melted, as if a frothing lunatic had placed that mask on a man-sized blob of writhing jelly and called it a person. He undulated to and fro, stealing a glance at the thing off to the side slowly deleting this forgotten bit of unreality.

"asRieL?" Gaster's voice was like a blob of putty thrown into a saucepan and left to boil. He spoke slowly, as if he were trying to translate whatever nonsense language he called his own into something that the Dreemurr kids could understand. He moved his head back and forth, around, and through Asriel. "in thE paST timELINe YOU aRe DEceaSeD. thIs IS nOt YOuR fORm. yOU haVe NO soUL."

"Frisk's keeping me alive. That's the human, with the DETERMINATION."

"YeS. THe ONE whO hAS pICKed It UP. YoU wisH mE To REturN to mY fAMILY. GiVE mE YoUR SOUL So I mAy lEAve thIS plAcE."

"I'm not giving you my SOUL, but I am taking you home," Frisk said, and Gaster looked at her askance, his head upside-down. "Az, hold onto him." Reluctantly, he tried, but there wasn't anything to touch, and she took the beacon in one hand and Asriel's hand in the other, and to her shock neither of them seemed really-real or felt like anything either, and with all the fear and DETERMINATION she could possibly muster, she focused on the other beacon, and hoped and prayed it was enough to

==LOAD==

"getting you where you're going," Asmodeus said, and then stopped as he and Alphys stared at what had appeared alongside Frisk and Asriel. The kids turned, and there was Gaster, his cracked-mask face in a smile. Sans and Papyrus rushed to greet their father, but as Gaster tried to say something he coughed. Oily, black gunk came pouring out of his mouth and around the edges of his mask, and as it ate its way through the metal floor it reeked like several mutant skunks had built a chemical weapon out of battery acid and selenium compounds. Asmodeus immediately fled the room. Frisk gagged at the stench, rolling backwards and trying to blow out as much air as she could while not breathing in any more, wondering if that mess would give her cancer quickly or slowly, wishing she had a Geiger counter. Asriel pushed the air away from Frisk, and Gaster's form rippled in the magical breeze. Sans immediately went to his father's side, comforting him, and Papyrus rushed towards him with outstretched arms, screaming in joy.

"Is that what puke is?" Asriel asked, disturbed, still retreating.

"If I ever puke up something like that, get me to the hospital or just rip my stomach out," Frisk said, and it came out funny because she was pinching her nose. "Are you all right?" she called from the other side of the lab.

"I apologize," Gaster said, and his voice was deep, rich, and smooth as silk. He sounded like an old, confident professor in a very expensive college. "Before I crossed into the border world, my experiment nearly destroyed me."

"dad, you're not gonna melt, are ya?" Sans quietly asked as his brother bawled uncontrollably and both of them hugged him deeply.

"The time for melting is done, my son. In the border world I had managed to seal away my DETERMINATION until such time as I rejoined the world of matter." He nodded his head down at the still-sizzling pool of gunk he'd puked out, DETERMINATION and monster-mass gone rancid. "Injecting it into myself was a foolish decision, it seems. I deeply regret all the trouble and the alterations of memories." He only then seemed to notice that his skeletal children were hugging him, and he hugged them back with his robelike arms, not used to being constrained to a finite number of physical dimensions. "Frisk, how did you change the patterns of truth? By what method did you apply an impossible future to this universe?"

"I keep having to tell people this," Frisk said, slowly releasing her hold on her nose (bad idea- the stench still filled the room) "I don't know. I thought maybe you might." Alphys had found a bottle of Febreze and a small box of Arm & Hammer; she ripped the tops off both and upended them onto the pool of gunk, causing it to bubble even more before quieting down.

"Then we shall find out, in... the fullness of time," Gaster said, and he stiffened up as if he expected it to happen right then. "I must retrain myself. It will take some time for me to become accustomed to this world again."

Papyrus started gushing unreservedly, talking about how much fun they were going to have and if Dad would like to watch Papyrus cook and how they were going to throw a huge party for Frisk and how he was very very sorry that he had to be a lawyer. Asmodeus came back in halfway through it; he'd taken off his coat and wrapped his long-sleeved undershirt around his face. He looked as if he planned on blowing air away from him, but seeing Frisk on the far side of the room he chose not to.

Gaster laughed good-naturedly, hushing his son. "Then we shall, Papyrus. Frisk, I must thank you for sharing your essence with Prince Asriel. Many of the futures in which you did not were disquieting."

"Did Chara win?" Asriel asked, suddenly afraid. "In those other futures?"

"Some of them, yes. Others, no. A few were worse." Frisk and Asriel shared a look: worse?! "Leaving him behind would have taken a great toll on you, a toll that here, you did not pay." Gaster smiled, even as Frisk and Asriel worked it out; exactly how far could Frisk fall? What if Flowey slowly poured poison into her ear, or what if she were released onto the world with sorrow in her heart and made some sort of pact with Chara? If she really didn't care about what she had remembered, and lost faith in her parents, how many futures could she burn through before she found the one she wanted? "I must... spend... time... with my sons now. I shall see you again... tonight." Concepts relating to time management came slowly to him.

Asmodeus didn't even need to look at Frisk, although he did anyway, staring at her as if she were some sort of supreme empress who could order a man's head to be severed at a whim without consequence. Gaster lived beyond time and space in a world outside the reach of physics, and I'm still the dangerous one.

A dangerous one who needs a bath.

"Thank you so much for doing this, Alphys," the snowman said, as the very thoroughly bundled-up lizard helped it into a freezer, Greater Dog carting it onto a dolly to be wheeled along through Hotland and to the surface. She'd even helped restore the missing piece that Chara, wearing Trump's body, had gobbled up. Water in any phase was not a common substance for monsters to build themselves out of, and this one had used so much of it, it couldn't even move. Like most monsters, it was at least somewhat contented with its limited existence, and it was very pleased for its small piece to have played such a critical role in espionage. (Maybe they should call me... Frosty the Snowspy.) The forecast for Mt. Ebbot for all of next week was in the mid-twenties, and it didn't have any separated pieces to magically keep cold this time, so Frosty the Snowspy and Alphys agreed that it was safe enough and Frosty wouldn't get any unexpected surprises.

The freezer didn't have any glass, however, so it had to guess where it was from the feel of the wheels. A bit of squelching, some rumbling, some more rumbling at a different pitch, the elevator's motion; Frosty enjoyed the sensations, and its smile grew big. It couldn't wait to be let out to play with monsters and human children on the surface. The motion grew slower and more precarious as Greater Dog slowly walked downhill; Frosty was worried that the freezer would tip over, but it didn't.

"I-it looks like this is a good place," Alphys said, and Frosty kept on smiling with its coal-button mouth as the other two monsters helped it out of the freezer. Its smiling mouth froze into a rictus grin, its coal eyes staring at the nightmarish scene before it. "These snowmen sure are unusual," she continued, making sure Frosty's carrot nose was set right, and Frosty could not speak for shock. The snowman to its left was holding onto its own decapitated head, its mouth in a perpetual mask of horror as it stared at its own body. Another snowman was built upside-down, its face smashed into the snow. A third looked to be trying to put its own eviscerated snow back into its belly with frantic twig hands. Yet another, to its right, was neatly cloven in half, the two sides separating but never falling down. Frosty couldn't see behind itself to know what terrors lurked there; all it could do was look past the macabre sculptures inside the house, where Frisk and Asriel were sitting on a couch together, enjoying cups of hot cocoa with their own family and the skeleton family, watching The Polar Express while a bright fire roared nearby.

Greater Dog barked amicably, and the dog and Alphys left Frosty alone with its surroundings.