The gentle hum of your computer sounded as you carefully tapped on the keyboard. Awakening from sleep mode, the dual computer monitors filled your room with light. The computer's fans suddenly started spinning at Mach 5, the annoying loud whirring taking you by surprise again. You growled lowly at your desktop, reminding yourself that you have to eventually do something about that. With your favorite operating system fully loaded and while opening your browser of choice, you put on your headset to drown out the noise.

Entering into Skype, you glanced at the time. It was past 4am, but that didn't really matter to you. Reflexively clicking on the recent tab and then entering your usual chat of friends, you found that it was just as lively as ever. These people chatting were your friends. Some you've met in games, others you've met in various sites. After a while, your friend from one place was introduced by you to another friend, one thing led to the other, and now you're all talking to each other over Skype. You've even met some of these people in real life before, although not all of them were so easily available.

Before saying hello to your internet family, you scanned the most recent relevant history of the chat. You notice they were talking about the usual bullshit. Spewing memes, talking about the newest games, they were even talking about the semi-recent monster 'invasion'. Invasion was not the right word, of course. It was just what some of the people, including some but not all of your friends, called a completely new species of sentient beings suddenly appearing and inhabiting your country.

You shook your head at them. They weren't all the sharpest, but there were nice enough. Taking a breath, you began to type. "Hey guys, what's up?"

You smiled at the sudden emergence of names typing all at once, giving you greetings. Oddly enough, you notice someone was in the chat room that you've never seen before. Being ever couth, you typed out "Who's Alphys?"

Two people, one of whom was this mystery person Alphys, began to type at the same time. Your friend Kasey answered first, with Alphys sending her message immediately after.

"ted met her over at the plant. shes chill"

"H-Hi, I'm new. My name is Alphys."

You smiled and raised an eyebrow. They actually stuttered in a chatroom. Granted you would no doubt do that while meeting a stranger as well, you certainly would not insert a stutter in a place of text. Admittedly, it was kind of cute. Accepting this new person into your friend army, you quickly shot this Alphys a friend request as you did everyone else in the group. After that, you quickly began to type your next message to your friends, ready to jump into the ever usual conversation. That is, until, you notice that Alphys just messaged you. Your message still half-written, you clicked on Alphy's name to see what they had written to you.

"H-Hey! So, um, how are you?"

Suppressing a giggle, you typed out a response to her.

"I'm doing good, and you?"

Waiting patiently for her to type out her response, you glanced back at the main chat before coming back to her message.

"I'm good too! Do you like anime?"

You have no idea what could have prompted that, but you went along with it, for this poor awkward person's sake.

"Yeah, I like it a lot."

"Hey! Me too!"

Double exclamation marks, you noticed. Obviously this Alphys was excited to talk about it. You waited for a moment, willing to give them your full attention, but then noticed that they didn't respond further. Peeking into the other chat room, you noticed they weren't talking there either. You wondered for a moment if they was talking to somebody else. You sent them another message just to make sure.

"So what animes do you like?"

There, a good question if you do say so yourself. You expected to get a reply a little later, but it came almost immediately.

"Well! Where do I start?!"

For the rest of that night, you spent it having a back and forth with Alphys. You quickly found out that Alphys has quite good taste, having watched most of the animes you were willing to discuss. You felt yourself getting drawn into the conversation, as the other chat room goers weren't that into anime, or were too busy fawning over anime that you weren't really interested in. Much more intriguing was the fact that the pairings that you shipped, they were mostly tolerant of or wholeheartedly endorsed!

Minutes turned to hours, you slowly got to learn more about Alphys. They were female, for one. That much didn't surprise you. However, when after telling her a little bit about yourself, you asked for more details on this person's life. She had paused for a moment, before telling you that she had only a year ago emerged from the underground and was a monster.

"Huh, no fooling,"

"Yeah," she typed back, then continued her message with, "T-That's not a problem, is it?"

You laughed to yourself before typing back to her. "No, I don't really care if someone is monster or human, fam."

There was another pause, this one longer than the last. Finally, she wrote back to you. "Thanks."

You felt an alien feeling in your chest. It was a warm feeling in your heart that you've never experienced before. You had heard some media on some news webpage about the dangers of monsters. How dangerous magic was and how they have the ability to draw out a human's SOUL. This didn't really felt anything like what was described then. Instead, it was a welcomed feeling, as if reuniting with a dear, long lost friend. You typed back to her once more.

"I'm going to head into bed now, it's pretty late. Talk to you tomorrow?"

"YES! I'll definitely talk to you tomorrow! Good night!"

Glancing over at the clock, it was already past 8am. You normally don't go to bed this late, but you were so sucked into the conversation with Alphys that you lost track of time. It wasn't like you had to do anything or had to be anywhere though, so it didn't matter to you. You could go to sleep, wake up, and then hopefully talk with your friends in the morning. Hopefully Alphys will be up at that time too. Who knows? You realized you neglected to ask her where she lived, if she was on the other side of the world or not. Sighing, you made a mental note to yourself to ask her at the very least what her time zone was. You already told her you were going to sleep, so it wasn't like you could just ask her again, that'd be awkward.

Sleeping your computer, taking your headset, you plopped yourself onto bed without showering or changing into pajamas. Because you didn't have any reason to go outside tomorrow, it obviated the need for any kind of cleanliness. You might call yourself disgusting or a slob, but as long as nobody saw you like that, it's fine.

Yawning, you shifted yourself into your favorite sleeping position and felt your consciousness fade away from you.

Haha, I just made my first monster friend, you thought before being taken by sleep.