Papyrus, being Papyrus, had gotten deeply invested into the kids' movie and cried when the generic Christmas music started playing near the end. Sans was just Sans, although if he didn't hold Frisk in high regard that morning, he certainly did sitting by his father's side. And Gaster... Frisk found W.D. Gaster weird, and even Asriel was slightly unsettled by him. More than once, Frisk looked at him, trying to figure him out, but he was hard to look at. It wasn't clear how many hands he actually had under his mass, and she figured it'd be rude to ask. At times, he looked fluid, like a blob of the black slime he'd puked out; other times, he looked like what Frisk had expected the father of skeletons to look like, and he appeared to be wearing a dark waistcoat and white pants, extra hands floating around him, flickering in and out. Gaster showed unusual interest in the movie, not because of the weird CGI or the strange ideas, but because it had scene changes, moving camera angles, and a beginning, middle, and end, and he was not used to any of those things.

Adding to the weirdness, Toriel had allowed Papyrus to cook, under strict supervision, and Undyne came in halfway through after putting Kid to bed.

"HEY UNDYNE!" Papyrus greeted her. "TORIEL JUST GOT DONE SHOWING ME WHAT CHILI PEPPERS ARE! I'VE GOT A NEW RECIPE FOR SPAGHETTI, I CALL IT 'BURN DOWN YOUR MOUTH BUT NOT YOUR HOUSE' SPAGHETTI! ALSO FRISK AND ASRIEL RESCUED MY DAD GASTER FROM LIMBO."

"Oh, that's your dad?" Undyne asked, looking at Gaster.

"yup. mine too."

"Really? Well, I've got to hand it to you two, then," she said, looking at the Dreemurr kids and grinning widely. "There's no masking your courage, you ran headlong into the jaws of disgaster." She turned to Sans and Papyrus. "Being skelesons without your father must have been amorphous-trating thing than I could imagine." Sans had nothing to reply with, and Undyne flipped up her eyepatch and stared at him with one eye and one laser beam. "I told you my day of victory would come." Everyone was confused, then Asriel and Frisk suddenly remembered what she was talking about, and they shared a long laugh.

The spicy spaghetti was surprisingly edible, if a bit on the hot side, and Gaster, taking polite and even forkfuls, soaked his share up through all the holes in his mask.

Just before bed, Frisk ran Checkup out of habit (although the odds of any of her friends dying on a repeated-day were very slim and most of them were right there anyway), SAVEd (after having rescued someone from beyond reality, DETERMINATION was in ample supply), and hit another button for "I just SAVEd". Rememberers would want to know when they were going to reappear at.

Frisk and Asriel had very weird dreams that night, and Frisk twitched in bed, knocking the covers off, but a slender ghost tucked the Dreemurr kids back in. She woke up slowly before the sun rose, taking stock of her surroundings. The ability to feel her own body? Check. Goatbro next to her? Check. She gently petted Asriel's ears, and he bleated giddily as he was tickled awake. He tickled back, and the two of them wound up rolling off the bed into a puddle of blankets, her face firmly planted in his warm, fuzzy chest.

Asriel untangled himself and makde a show of stretching, something he'd never need to actually do, going back over the bed to snap on his bracelets, smiling and saying, "It's a brand new day today!" Frisk laughed; from anyone else, that was an empty platitude, but mornings weren't always guaranteed to be new ones for them. She glanced at her phone, looking at the time (early AM, but that wasn't too bad anymore; they'd need to start getting up early for school) and saw a message from Alice titled simply "The Count". The count of what county? Count Dracula? Or was it the Sesame Street count? Intrigued, she read it out loud:

"Fatalities: 59. Injuries: 105. Crimes: 78. Foreign policy activities are not part of the Count." Frisk swallowed.

"Why would she, why would anyone tell you that 59 fatalities happened?!" Asriel shouted in disbelief.

"No, Az. That's not how many happened. That's how many didn't happen. Because of me."

"Holy crap," Asriel muttered. Fifty-nine human lives. And it'd just begun. Frisk looked at some of the appended notes. Somebody's dad didn't get shot for his wallet, which had far, far less money in it than Frisk's. Somebody's little girl didn't get into the medicine cabinet. Somebody got arrested for DUI before he even left the parking lot of a bar and so never flattened a married, expecting couple. "Wait, how's it so many? Asmodeus couldn't have made that many before the project really even got started?"

"They can still watch the news, Az, and they've got to have special access to cop stuff," Frisk reminded him. This was what those handful of people were frantically trying to remember while Frisk was shoveling candy down her gob. Did her extra few minutes increase or decrease this number, or do nothing at all? She would never know, and it filled her with guilt until she remembered that if it weren't for her, all of them would be dead. In fact, if she'd taken another path, all of them, everywhere, would be dead. She didn't want to think about it. "C'mon," she said, snapping on her bracelets. "I smell French toast, but I have to go to the bathroom." They started their morning ritual, and Asriel playfully remarked from the other side of the door that what had come out of Gaster's front end was only slightly worse than what was coming out of Frisk's rear. While the spicy spaghetti hadn't been so bad going down, it was not agreeing with her in the other direction.

"Do you know what not being able to poop makes you?" Frisk asked rhetorically. "It makes you full of..." Asriel laughed. Frisk sighed after a bit. "This is going to be really, really awkward."

"You need help?" Asriel asked.

He's a monster, Frisk reminded herself. He doesn't even have these digestive organs. "Can you just kind of push it out? Go easy." Asriel came in, and he reached down to touch Frisk's abdomen; at first, there was nothing, then there was a volcanic eruption of boiling lye shot out with 12-gauge shells, then blessed, blessed relief, and it took the savior of monsterkind six sheets of toilet paper to clean it all off.

"And just think, we get to do that again tomorrow," Asriel said, grinning, and Frisk gave him a very recognizable gesture that even he knew the meaning of. "C'mon, let's finish up before Dad leaves." They'd gone to bed before he'd come home last night, and he greeted them heartily as they came down the stairs.

"Are you beginning to understand what I told you?" he asked.

"About nobility? Yeah, I'm glad we saved W.D.," Asriel said, sitting at the table next to his sister, where plates of buttered, homemade, cinnamon-coated french toast waited for them. How does she know? Frisk wondered. Without school, the Dreemurr kids got out of bed whenever they wanted; how could Toriel know when they'd come down to eat breakfast? Sure, she could hear them, but Frisk hadn't been on the toilet that long! Frisk wondered whether her mother had some sort of time powers of her own or a sixth sense relating to motherhood and decided it had to be the latter. The first bite, followed quickly by a second and a third (small and chewed thoroughly!) confirmed it.

"No," Asgore said, chuckling, "about being the future." He turned to Frisk, and smiled, and Frisk didn't know everything he was smiling about. Since the car bomb had never gone off, the late-night meeting had, and the foiled plot had dominated the evening news and had been brought up in the round-table conversation. Someone had asked how the perpetrators had been discovered, and Asgore only had to utter the words 'Because of my daughter' for the room to erupt into a torrent of questions and a legendary shouting match. In moments, the humans had reduced themselves to squabbling children, and His Majesty, Asgore Dreemurr ruled over them all (save for the American ambassador, who was made from the same mold as Trump and had smugness to spare), and there was saber-rattling and accusations of blasphemy and many, many angry and desperate votes. By the time the dust cleared, there were six permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, despite Asgore not controlling a nation-state. "You are the future of humans and monsters," he said yet again. "You may not understand what that means yet. One day, you will."

"Do you understand it?" Asriel asked his father. Frisk was about to ask how he knew it, but chose not to. To her it seemed more like a statement of faith than a statement of fact, and she didn't know how to deal with that.

Asgore chuckled again. "I'm afraid I don't, not completely. I've even asked Dr. Gaster. Not even he knows what Frisk will do." What I will do. Not what everyone else in the world will do, not what 'we' will do, but what I will do.

"Dad," Frisk protested, "I have one power. I can LOAD to one SAVE. That's all I can do! Everything else is other people. Okay, that voice thing, but that was just once and I don't even know what that was. And I got all this from falling down a mystery hole! I'm not... I'm just not, okay?"

"There are at least fifty-nine humans who have reason to believe you are," Asgore replied. "'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.'" The kids didn't even realize he was quoting something, but Asgore knew the play very well; the First Folio had come to the colonies at roughly the same time he had formed. He finished up his relatively small breakfast, which would have been days' worth of French toast for both of the kids combined, and leaned down and gently kissed his children on the tops of their heads after getting up. He had a plane to catch; a fifteen-foot Japanese mini-kaiju was destroying property, and ten minutes ago, Shinzo Abe himself had requested Asgore's assistance in quelling the beast without committing the sin of killing it. (Which Asgore couldn't promise. Sometimes these things involved ritual combat.)

"Oh? What's this?" Asgore asked, picking up a package left at the door. It was a brown box about four feet cubed, and Frisk suddenly feared it was a bomb before realizing it really didn't matter. But the package was labeled as being from Gaster and Alphys, and it contained two sets of matching bracelets, two chargers, and two other devices that plugged into the wall and featured a jumble of long antennae. Asgore left to assert his dominance while the kids unpacked it.

The difference between Alphys and Gaster, Frisk found, was in their craftsmanship. Alphys' bracelets looked bulky next to the svelte, deep-red ones Gaster had produced, and Gaster's felt like they weren't even there, to the point that Frisk kept checking her wrists to make sure she was wearing them. When Asriel exchanged his, their entire color changed to lime green. There were actual instructions, in extremely adept cursive by a flowing hand (or set of them) that Frisk swiftly figured out how to read. The bracelets themselves had only slightly greater range, but the antenna-bearing devices, as the instructions described, were repeaters; they kept the bracelets connected in a roughly one-kilometer radius, even through buildings, but the repeaters could connect to each other. Theoretically, with enough of them, Frisk and Asriel could be on opposite sides of the country. "They finished all this last night?" Frisk asked, and then read the last line of the instructions; Gaster, of course, could remember unhappened events, and he'd be collecting feedback to make them again. "He did this in one night, knowing it'd just be gone?!" Frisk asked, amazed.

"We did kind of save him from eternity," Asriel said, raising an eyebrow.

"I am never, ever going to get used to this," Frisk said, reading further: Alphys (judging from the handwriting) had suggested that the cellular network of the entire world could and should be rejiggered for this functionality, and it dawned on Frisk that they'd all probably for-real do it if she asked nicely. Frisk couldn't imagine how many people would have to climb cell towers (but if they fell off, they wouldn't have) to let that happen. An entire world-spanning system, altered just in case Asriel wanted to go to the beach while Frisk was at home. "Never, ever." She sighed, going back to her French toast with her brother while Toriel looked over the discarded instructions, smiling. "They're all going to know," Frisk said after eating some more and washing it down with orange juice. "Everyone in our class, I mean. They're all going to know the video, they're all going to know about DETERMINATION, or they'll figure something out- Mom, I'll have to show up for school every day!" Toriel shook her head at that. "If I don't, they're going to figure it out, oh, Frisk didn't come to school today, maybe this day isn't going to actually happen!" The last bites of sugary French toast were a nice contrast to the worry.

"Young princesses should harbor little concern with what others may think of them," Toriel said primly, "and they should harbor less concern with things that, strictly speaking, do not happen at all. They ought to show more concern with their education."

"What do you mean, Mom?" Frisk asked, puzzled. "We're going to be educated in school, but we don't have to worry about that yet, do we?"

Toriel frowned. "I fear I was remiss. I had sent an informational packet to all the other families, but I had neglected to give one to you." She speed-walked into another room and came back with a thickly packed, unclosed envelope with no address on it. The kids took it out and flipped past the stuff that wasn't important to them- there were lots of details on bus schedules, arrangements for differently aged children from the same family, and how getting through the military cordon worked- and read everything else. There weren't any school uniforms, thank God, but of course there wouldn't be when many of the students didn't even have the same number of limbs. There were detailed, in-depth guidelines for lockers, the belongings of younger children, and nearly everything else under the sun. Frisk looked for any mention of her own name or Asriel's, but of course neither Toriel nor anyone working for her would ever be so crass as that. Everybody already knew, anyway.

"Frisk!" Asriel exclaimed, gesturing to one part, his eyes wide open. "'Classes will be determined not by age but by aptitude.'" Frisk reacted immediately, knowing what that meant. "'Every effort will be made to allow students to attend classes relative to their own skill levels in different fields...'"

"Yes, my son," Toriel said, confusing the look of panic on Asriel's face for one of simple surprise. "It is quite fortunate that your bracelets have been improved. You need not sit beside one another or even attend any of the same classes at all." Frisk and Asriel stared at her, mouths open in shock, and she looked back at them. There was a brief moment of confusion before Frisk turned to the paper Asriel was holding. "Okay, lemme see. We've got math, English, science- oh no- social studies- aww, no- P. E. slash M. E... what.. oh, Physical Education and Magical Education. I get it."

"Yeah, there's no way we can be in the same class for that," Asriel said. "These classes happen at the same time? That's good, then we can... but wait, Mom!"

"I am fully aware of the implications," Toriel said. "Consider it a lesson in using your abilities more frugally." If Asriel borrowed too much of Frisk's energy while Frisk was already exercising, neither of them would find the good times they sought. "I hope that each of you does well on your tests... where are you going?" The kids had started walking upstairs.

"To study!" Asriel called back.

"I am glad to see you so eager," Toriel said, with a wide smile.

"Mom, you just said that if we don't know the same things we won't be in the same classes!" Frisk exclaimed, gesturing with her hands and causing Toriel's face to wrinkle in confusion and, finally, realization. "Okay, Az, do you even know what Congress is?"

"I know what a congress is..."

"Okay, let's start there." The two of them spent a great deal of time looking things up online. The Supreme Court, the bicameral legislature, the Constitution, the Electoral College and what was so special about the number 538, although California was still making noise about dividing into two states and Puerto Rico was still waffling on statehood. They looked up history, but at Frisk's age the tests would be just facts and numbers and names; the two World Wars ("Your species did what?!" Asriel shouted), the Civil War and slavery (Asriel was befuddled as to why anyone would enslave any hated ethnic group; if you didn't like them, why bring them to your country?), the American Revolution (Frisk was expecting Asriel, as a born prince, to want to take the side of the Redcoats, but he held that George III should have been forcibly dethroned for failing to properly support the colonists), and Frisk judged that they weren't likely to be asked too much about anything in America before that. Good thing, too; the person to ask about that stuff was their father, and Asgore tended to get misty-eyed when remembering the distant past. Which Frisk also gave Asriel a crash course in, right along with herself; she had no idea who the actual Martin Luther was, she thought that the Holy Roman Empire was the same as the original one, she only vaguely knew that the Mayans had built pyramids, she'd never even heard of the Three Kingdoms, and everything relating to the old Hellenic city-states was all Greek to her. Prehistory was an even more interesting subject, and of course Asriel loved reading about dinosaurs.

"Hey, Az," Frisk asked, "were there monsters from dinosaurs, do you know?" Dinosaur monsters, how cool would that be?

"I don't think so, the only animals that make monsters now are you, and they wouldn't leave fossils, anyway," Asriel answered, and the kids grudgingly moved away from the subject and onto other scientific topics. Taxonomy was something that Frisk understood nearly as little as Asriel; chemistry, roughly the same; but basic physics was something that Asriel intuitively grasped. As a magical creature, he directly applied F to m to create a, and he knew very well what friction and gravitational acceleration were. Being curious, they moved on to topics above their presumed grade level, and when they read what Einstein's famous equation actually meant, Asriel was singularly unsurprised.

"Well, yeah, matter is just bound energy," he said, shrugging. "You didn't know that?"

"I think I might have heard it before?" Frisk replied, trying to remember something from an old sci-fi show. Oh, right, that was what made antimatter so powerful- "Hey, you can't unbind that energy, can you?!"

"Maybe? A little super-tiny bit? If you ate a whole bag of sugar and I really, really tried?"

"Don't ever do it," Frisk said, with more than a little fear in her voice. "That's worse than nuclear bombs. Maybe right before I LOAD but even then don't do it." They moved on. Asriel found geology and hydrology endlessly fascinating, and Frisk remembered things about plate tectonics and the water cycle she'd been taught in simple terms in the fourth grade. Longitude, latitude, time zones, Daylight Savings; Frisk made a point of learning about these things, in detail, not because of school but because, as the princess of time, she had to understand everything about how humans everywhere experienced it, whether they were on the other side of the planet or above the Arctic Circle. Asriel found these things fascinating, too, and the idea that not only did the entire planet orbit its own star but some other ball of rock orbited the planet (and he could just look up at the right times to see each of them!) was jaw-dropping. There would be a total lunar eclipse in the middle of next month, right above the United States, and Asriel said that he wanted to watch it. Twice. Maybe three times. There would also be a total solar eclipse in the summer of next year, but that would only hit South America, and they looked forward to traveling there to see it.

Mathematics was easier to handle, because they both understood generally the same amount: not much. Basic solve-for-X algebra was pretty simple stuff but anything beyond that (what's a quadratic, and why is there an equation for it?) went right over their heads. Frisk worried that Asriel didn't know the mechanics of long division, which he didn't, and she was in the middle of giving him a crash course when their mother approached the door.

"C'mon in, Mom," Asriel said, working out a problem with Frisk's help. It didn't help that he didn't have multiplication tables memorized very well.

The look on her face was apologetic. "I wasn't aware that the two of you wanted to stay together so badly," she said, having heard their constant, determined studying for the past couple of hours. "I had thought that, after so long being stuck together, the two of you would have enjoyed some time apart."

"Mom, I know you said not to worry, but right now I might be a bigger religious figure than the Pope," Frisk said, and Asriel had just learned who that was. "I'm not doing this alone unless I have to." What Frisk didn't say was that the idea scared her so much that, if teaching Asriel didn't work out, she'd seriously considered outright cheating, from faintly whispering answers under her breath to breaking into the school building and memorizing the test right before a LOAD. With Az it'd be easy.

"I've never been in a classroom at all," Asriel added. "I really want Frisk there to help me."

"Can you just put him in whatever classes I get?" Frisk asked, and she knew both of them could hear every drop of barely concealed desperation in her voice. "Or, actually, if he gets better classes than I do, put me in those classes? Because we've got a lot of time to catch each other up."

Toriel smiled. "Is this really what you want?"

"Mom, I really, really don't ever want to be alone again," Asriel said, moving closer to Frisk, and it did not take any deep thinking to realize why. "I know it'll be a class, with other kids, but they won't be anyone I know."

"I've got an actual brother now," Frisk said, hugging him close, feeling his soft fur against her cheek. "I don't want to be apart from him, not for stuff like this. Maybe when we're a lot older."

Toriel closed her eyes and smiled wider, her hands folded in front of her against her robe. "The two of you have become inseparable in truth. Come along, my children. It is time for lunch." Lunch largely consisted of cucumber sandwiches, one of which Victoria, wearing her hastily brushed-off snowsuit, was already eating; Frisk worried that they wouldn't taste very good, but the cucumbers were crisp and unsalted and the bread was thick and fluffy. "I will make every effort to do as you ask," Toriel explained, and she did not need exceptional ears to hear the relief from both of them. "But you should continue your mutual studies. I do not wish to commit nepotism." Neither of them knew what that was, and they resolved to look it up.

"Frisk? Aswiel?" Victoria piped up. She actually said 'Aswiel' and it was to his credit that he didn't laugh, although Frisk had to suppress a chuckle. "Play with me and Frosty," she requested.

"Tomorrow," Frisk said, and Asriel knew which kind of tomorrow she meant. "We really have to study for school."

"Do I have to?"

"No. All you have to worry about is not setting any of the other kids on fire," Frisk explained. Kids Frisk's age knew better than to mess with someone with supernatural power. Preschoolers and kindergarteners were less astute, and it didn't take a genius to realize what might happen if some brat took one of her crayons.

"Dad said that!" she complained, and Asriel and Frisk laughed. Her father had also told her lots of other things, such as not to wish anyone into a cornfield, but of course she had no idea what he was talking about. "I'm done. I'm going to Frosty. I can't set him on fire." It was only as she ran out the door that Frisk looked out the window and realized who Frosty was and what surrounded him. Making all those horrifically mutated and mutilated snowmen really had been a lot of fun, and that only made it worse.

"Uh, Az... I think we messed up, and someone else really messed up."

"You think we should try to apologize?" Asriel asked, as Toriel figured out who he meant and covered her mouth in shock.

"Well, he's looking at us now, so... I guess. Even though he won't remember." Frisk smiled despite herself. Fifty-nine humans whom she made not die in one day, and she was worried about having traumatized a monstrous snowman.

"Go study," Toriel commanded. "I will handle this myself."

"Mom, we're the ones who-" Asriel started.

"Go. Study." She put her foot down, and it sounded like a hard hoof despite being a padded foot, and the kids decided that it was good not to have to deal with this and went back upstairs to study. They jumped from topic to topic a lot when they got bored, which happened frequently. They tried to memorize facts and figures of basic stuff that they thought might be on a test, and Frisk practiced reading cursive (if only everyone who used it could write like Gaster!) and Asriel practiced long division and multiplication tables (basic video games were far harder than this), and eventually the two of them discovered that they could not tolerate any more of it and laid back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

Asriel couldn't get headaches the same way Frisk could, but he was swiftly beginning to understand the concept. "Is this what our life's going to be like now?" he asked. "Studying and worrying about tests?" He enjoyed the world he'd found himself in, but that enjoyment was starting to sour after several hours of trying to cram down information about it.

"Some of it, but Mom's better than my old school. We had to do a lot of stupid stuff, and projects, and the teacher didn't understand half the stuff she was handing out."

"How's that possible?"

"She didn't write the worksheets, she just handed them out. 'Here, do this project.' And it had to have all these different parts, and each part had to be a certain way, and I'd never even heard of National History Day before. I had an assigned partner, but she didn't know anything either. And I went home, and who there did I have to ask for help? Mom's school has got to be a lot better than that. We helped make it, remember? Besides, we kind of have to study, you know?" Asriel didn't know. "I mean, we've had so much greatness thrust upon us that we better know how the world works. Otherwise we might screw up or do something stupid."

"Is this what growing up is?" Asriel faintly asked.

"I guess so? A lot of grown-ups aren't really grown-ups either. Their bodies are, but they just don't grow up, grow up. My not-mom was kind of like that."

"So you're saying that either we study or we end up like her?"

"I don't think anything would make that happen," Frisk said, and they shared a laugh. "I'm just saying that... I mean... nothing can make us go to school, Az. If we decided we really, really didn't want to, who'd say we had to? The government? Mom?" Asriel turned to look at her, not saying anything. "And that's why we really should."

"Okay, but not right now." They gleefully wasted the rest of the day playing video games that didn't strongly feature progression, as that progress would not be saved. Mom called them down for dinner, and everyone was there: Undyne, Alphys, Gaster and his children, Undyne, Kid, and of course Victoria, as her father was on the other side of the country, conducting interviews. "Thanks for the bracelets, W.D.," Asriel said.

"You are quite welcome," he said, his voice oily yet comforting. "Have you tested them?" He reached over Victoria's plate of grilled, lemon-infused catfish; the stiff bones fell upwards into his hand, and he crushed them to powder, which he sprinkled back onto the fish.

"No, we should go do that," he said, glancing at Frisk. "Hey, Mom, did you plug those repeaters in?"

"I have," she replied. "One is here, and the other is at school. Just in case." It made sense; the school itself was at the edge of the repeaters' range, near the Pizza Hut (which would surely be doing a fantastic amount of business) and the PX. Asriel de-boned Frisk's fish in much the same way Gaster had, and it was delicious and filling. They finished their meals and went out to test Gaster's system; Frisk stayed at home, and Asriel went to the far side of the school, and the bracelets remained a cheery color of bright green while the two talked on their phones. They could hear each other's unease at being apart, and it was kind of embarrassing. Mom was right; we really are inseparable now. There might have been another word for it, but neither Frisk nor Asriel knew what it was. Asriel swiftly flew himself back home when Dad called with video; the left side of his face and body had been burned, and he clutched his spear in his right hand as his left arm was nearly gone. His face and voice showed grim triumph, and he stood with one foot atop a barely-alive lizard that could easily have been Godzilla's baby brother. "Next time," Asgore grated, the picture pixelating in and out, "I'll be more careful of the fire."

"Why was it fighting?" Asriel asked.

"Humans had chosen to build on a location that it felt was an environmental sanctuary." He gave something that could have been a chuckle or a scoff. "The humans have now chosen not to build there- after I defeated it. And I can guarantee this is the way it'll be again."

"At least you'll do better next time," Frisk said.

"Yes," Asgore said, grimacing a smile, "that I will. Be safe, my children. Your power does not always save you from pain." He hung up before his wife could see him maimed.

Even though they knew he'd be all right, the kids went to bed uneasily that night, and Toriel made an effort to ease their anxiety, hugging them and gently tucking them in for the night. She sang something wordless and comforting that only one human had ever heard before. Frisk had no idea she could sing, but Asriel remembered and nearly cried his eyes out. "Mom, please stop, don't ever sing that again," he begged, sobbing into the sheets.

"Oh... I should have... I am so sorry," she said, leaving the room and closing the door. Frisk did not need to ask about the song or the last time Asriel heard it, and Asriel desperately clung to her as he slept.

It was time for the test, and Frisk looked up at the teacher, who was staring at her, judging. The first question: If these people will die in ten minutes, and you can run at twenty miles an hour, which of these routes can you take to save them? But all of the routes were more than a thousand miles long. Confused, she decided to skip it, but the next question was unreadable, in something that looked like cursive of a foreign language, so she decided to skip that one too, and got to the third question: Who have you forgotten about?

Frisk looked up at the teacher, about to ask how crazy the test was, but the teacher was half a foot away and her face was melting and-

"GAAAAH!" Asriel and Frisk screamed awake together. Asriel shivered in terror, and Frisk panted heavily. "That was bad," Frisk said, and Asriel did not reply. "Look on the bright side, at least the actual test can't be that bad, right?" Asriel's shivering turned into scared laughter. "We saved Gaster, we're saving the world, we haven't forgotten about anyone!" Frisk protested to whoever or whatever gave them that shared dream.

"We really haven't," Asriel agreed, still shaking. They did not dream again that night.

Their next few repeated days were spent much the same way. Toriel moved the snowman as soon as Frisk LOADed. Asgore did do much better the second time, and the enemy monster fared better as well; it'd surrendered after a few well-placed blows and wondered how Asgore knew all its moves, and it had understood when Asgore explained that it'd get the environmental protection it wanted. Frisk and Asriel studied geography and then went back over material they'd studied before, making sure they remembered everything. The Count increased dramatically, and the growing ability of police to respond to crimes before they happened was quickly making a lot of bad neighborhoods safer and starting no end of conspiracy theories, only one of which was true.

And then school started. On the day that counted, Frisk and Asriel walked there with their mother, arriving early; Frisk would have worn a dress, but it was way too cold, and she wore her heart-decorated striped overalls and matching shirt under her snow gear (and there was a place to take that stuff off), and Asriel's shirt and pants matched hers. They wore their roller shoes; perhaps in other schools, they might have gotten yelled at for that, but the number of yellers in this school could be counted on the fingers of no hands. It was one thing, Frisk realized, to see a building on paper and from a distance; it was another to be in it, rolling down its halls. It was clean, and airy, and had skylighting throughout. Frisk's last school had felt like a prison; this one felt like a university.

Toriel left them by themselves in a classroom, and they sat next to each other up front; there weren't any distracting posters lining the walls, the chairs and desks were separate and had storage (thank God!), and there was a long whiteboard up front. "Welcome to school, Az," Frisk said, and both of them were filled with the urge to run, to go 'We're really not going to do this, sorry Mom' and go home. But they chose not to do that, and the teacher came in and very politely introduced herself as Mrs. McNulty, and other children filed in behind her, every last one of them staring at Frisk while pretending not to, just as she knew they would. Kid was also there, surprisingly enough, and he didn't know why nobody sat next to Frisk and sat there himself; another boy, deciding to look daring, sat next to Asriel. Frisk was worried that they'd all have to introduce themselves ('Hi, I'm Frisk Dreemurr, Princess of Time! What's your name?'), but instead, Mrs. McNulty said that today would be a very short day and talked about the placement things that the Dreemurr kids already knew, and she handed them all pencils and surprisingly thick tests, and the room was silent save for the light whirring of Kid's mechanical arms.

A lot of the social studies stuff was simple questions: Where does the U.S. President live? That was an easy one for someone who almost got frogsplashed in the Oval Office. What are the five branches of the U.S. military? Five branches? Fortunately, it was a multiple-choice question, and she'd heard of the Coast Guard before so could arrive at the right answer. Who is the King of Monsters? Frisk's face fell open: Seriously?! It was nice to have a question involving monsterkind, but anyone who didn't know who Asgore Dreemurr was didn't belong in that school! At least that one wasn't multiple choice!

Frisk noticed Mrs. McNulty staring at Asriel and glanced over; her brother, not knowing the right way to hold a pencil, was writing with magic, holding the pencil in place and depositing the graphite where he wanted it to go. The teacher, noticing Frisk's look, immediately stopped staring and looked down at something on her desk. Frisk just smiled.

Other questions featured geography, and Frisk was glad she went over the topic with her brother, although she was sure she knew more about the fifty states and the world's countries than he did. What is the tallest mountain in the world? Everest, of course, and Asriel had mentioned wanting to climb it sometime. There was an easy math section and a somewhat hard math section and a couple of math sections that she had no choice but to completely skip. (Sines? Cosines? Tangents? What the heck were those?!) There weren't any questions about dinosaurs, but there were some questions about the differences between mammals, birds, fish, and reptiles, and there were a few physics questions that she knew Asriel would get right even if she had a bit of trouble recalling the answers.

But nothing beat the very last question on the test, a one-paragraph essay question, one that everyone in the room knew the answer to. Frisk almost laughed, even though it wasn't funny at all, and Asriel heard her almost-laugh and was reading the same page. Whoever put this question on here was either completely clueless or had a sick, merciless sense of humor. Clenching her pencil in her fist, Frisk worked up the determination to truthfully answer it.

The question was Who is the most important person in history and why?