I.
Nearly everyone had been wondering what the surface would be like.
Asgore and Toriel had known the surface, once upon a time, but knew it would be near-unrecognizable. The geography would be the same, mostly, but they couldn't count on more than that. In a way, they were the best prepared. You don't live for centuries without getting used to change.
Undyne had fantasized extensively about the surface, but recent events disrupted that. Her dreams hadn't completed the adjustment from full human extinction to peaceful coexistence just yet, and now existed in a halfway state, a befuddling mix of war and unity. At least they still featured humans, as always, even if the roles were shifting.
Alphys's idea of the surface contained massive inaccuracies, partially because they weren't in Japan.
Papyrus's expectations were uniquely his. He knew about many surface things, such as cars, the sun, stars, the horizon, the Queen of England, pure spring water, bamboo trees, parking meters, cumulonimbus clouds, trash compactors, plastic straws, bunnies, quasars, and all-you-can-eat pizzerias. He didn't know how they fit together, but he anticipated encountering many of them.
Sans just wanted to smell fresh rain, feel the drops on his skull, and get soaking wet. More than that would be welcome, but he didn't dare hope for it.
Of course for Frisk it was business as usual. They didn't expect to find anything out of the ordinary. They had left the surface just the other day.
But all of them were surprised when the landscape disappeared.
They went right through an invisible wall across the path. One moment they were looking at mountains, and the next they stood, perplexed, in a colossal, inhuman gallery.
They were surrounded by rows upon rows of immense, colored, shimmering cubes, including one they just exited.
The floor was glass, with a pattern of stars below it. The ceiling, high above, faintly reflected the cubes.
They were utterly lost.
The silence was broken by tuneless whistling.
The person doing the whistling strolled by from behind the corner, and stopped when he noticed them. "Oh. Hello there."
His body was mainly made up of a yellow sphere, with a large face. Spindly arms and legs dangled from the bottom, looking almost vestigial.
"I'm Gene," he said.
"Are you a monster?" Undyne asked.
"Huh, no. I'm an emoji."
"A-an emoji?" asked Alphys, unsure if she had heard it correctly.
"Yes. From Textopolis?" he said. "Right in the middle of the phone? A few apps north?"
"Y-you mean this is a, a." Alphys took a deep breath. "A phone?"
II.
The journey through Textopolis was uneventful, but odd. The town was made up of cubical buildings, not unlike the Wallpaper they had just left, and inhabited by other emojis.
Some of the emojis were little more than a face, with one expression, capable of expressing one emotion. Others were essentially objects with faces, but with an uncanny stylized, cartoonish look, not at all similar to monsters.
Papyrus enthusiastically greeted everyone they met, as well as the occasional inanimate object, by accident.
"So I think your app is some kind of video game," Gene said as they entered the town hall. "Jailbreak can explain it better than me. Doesn't look like she's here yet though."
Alphys was trying to puzzle it out. She knew a fair bit about phone software, and it decidedly didn't involve tiny anthropomorphic personifications running around acting out tasks.
In the center of the room was a circular arrangement of cubbyholes, surrounding an apparatus shaped like a hand with its index finger extended. That wasn't how texting worked.
"One - one question," she said. "How does it work? What do you, uh, do, as an emoji?"
"Oh, that's simple," Gene said. "When Alex - he's our user - gets ready to pick an emoji, we line up in the cubes. The scanner scans the emoji he picks, and then the scan gets sent in the message."
Alphys nodded. "Uh-huh. But that's not - I don't think - I'm pretty sure it doesn't work like that. Um."
"Oh?"
"I-it doesn't send the whole picture, it sends a, uh, number, and the other phone decodes that, b-by matching the code point to the Unicode standard, and, and…"
Gene wasn't keeping up. "The Unicode Consortium? The ambassador lives next door, maybe she knows."
"The ambassador," she said weakly. "The ambassador of the Unicode Consortium. Yeah. Okay."
It was clear Gene wasn't going to be much help.
"So it's all fake?" asked Undyne, loudly.
"What do you mean?"
"We were going to the surface, to join the humans. But you're saying they're fake, and we're from a computer game?"
"Humans are real," Gene said indignantly. "They live outside the phone."
"Look. Frisk here is a human, from the surface. But if the surface isn't real, then where the heck did they come from?"
III.
Frisk thought back to the surface. It was embarrassingly hard.
They did have their general knowledge. They knew the names of countries, they knew what year it was, they knew how to take the bus, and they knew it got cold in the winter and warm in the summer.
But the more personal things? Those were blank. No matter how much they concentrated, they didn't know their own birthday. They didn't know where they lived. They didn't remember anything about their parents, or whether they even had any - somehow, they had agreed to stay with Toriel without thinking about that at all.
They had no memories from before falling into the underground. And they hadn't realized it until now.
By all rights, this should have been distressing. But they didn't even remember remembering those things. What should have been a sense of loss came out as little more than bewilderment.
Frisk felt very small.