- This story takes place before the final chapter of Inseparable. Most of this will be totally unfamiliar unless you've read that story. -

The boys were home alone. Grandpa and Grandma were at some extra-boring international gala far from home, Dad was out doing something else in a different country (Gary, James' younger brother, hated hearing about that stuff- he was too kind for it), Uncle was at the hospital reversing people's shingles, and Mom was out with the girls doing "girl stuff", as she put it. James didn't know the details and wasn't sure if he wanted to.

Most ordinary parents would have balked at leaving an eight-year-old to supervise his close-to-seven and turning-six brothers. Nothing about James' life could be called ordinary by the standards of roughly two decades before his birth, before his uncle had shattered the barrier separating monsters from humanity. He didn't really realize this, because children don't. To him, monsters not being around and people not being able to cast magic were all part of the weird before-time that his parents and teachers talked about. He did know that his parents were extraordinary, even by the standards of his day- his mom really could go back and make bad things unhappen, the way every little kid cried for, and his dad was more or less unstoppable by any conventional metric. If anything went wrong, he had a lazy skeleton- and everyone else at Mt. Ebbot- to call upon, because he had a legitimate no-fooling royal title of Prince and the door-opening, head-turning last name of Dreemurr. (He had a strong sense of justice, and tried not to abuse them.)

Not that he expected anything to go wrong. Mander, his youngest brother, had learned- occasionally the hard way- to curb his overconfidence. He was still completely fearless, eagerly clutching his brand new, bright orange, perfectly sized snowboard (an early birthday present) in his tough gloves and leading his older brothers up the same slope his parents had gone down many times before. Even more than his siblings, he loved downhill sports, which were generally safe because even if he hit a bump and went flying, he'd do just that: go flying. James tolerated his beloved brother's exuberance, as he had since Mander was born. The little boy was so hyper, so desperate for action every day, that James wondered if Mander thought that his lifespan was limited and he'd die before the Sun did.

Which was just silly. Mom wouldn't let that happen.

They reached the top and Mander sat down quickly, about to snap his boots to the board. "Wait," James demanded, and the little boy looked up at him impatiently. "You have to plan things, remember? Where are you going to go?" James tried not to be annoying about this stuff- that was usually his big sister's role- but he was the oldest there.

Mander planned a simple route that would have earned several black diamonds from pre-magic skiers. "Around those trees, and then a somersault off that ramp, and then down around that way, and then another-"

"hOI!"

The boys turned their heads sharply. The little creature had two pairs of ears: one pair like a cat, the other somewhat like their uncle's. She was vibrating rapidly in place, which was understandable because she was only wearing a blue shirt and it was bitterly, brutally cold outside, and this monster didn't look like one of the cold-favoring varieties.

"Who're you?" Gary asked, holding out a deep green mitten to beckon her closer. James looked at the creature more intensely- her face was vibrating in different directions than the rest of her. Monsters did weird things, sometimes, but he got the impression that this one was even more off-kilter than Gaster himself.

"i'm tEMMIE!" Temmie started walking towards the boys, and Mander dropped his snowboard to run up to her. She eagerly leapt into his arms, and as he caught her she dived into the neck of his snowsuit, making him yell in shock. She eagerly peeked out from his neck, making his brothers laugh. "human WARM!" Mander shouted again, flailing at his neck, not knowing what to do. If he used too much force, he'd kill her- monsters were fragile, after all- and he didn't really want to toss her back into the snow, but she was freezing cold!

"Just wait," James advised. "She's really light, so she'll warm up quick." Biting his lip, Mander forced himself to hold still, and Gary rubbed his nose into the little creature's nose, sharing the warmth and causing general giggling. James was right, as usual- Temmie was made of the same stuff their uncle was made of, not bones like the skelebros or water like humans. "What are you doing out here?"

"tem come for TEMMAS! but no room for tem... can tem stay wif u?"

"Sure," Gary said immediately. James wanted to argue but couldn't. The creature needed shelter, after all, and Mt. Ebbot was a sanctuary for monsters. Some local businesses had human employees, but the Dreemurrs and the Riddles were still the only humans allowed to live within the perimeter. "But we call it Christmas." James had heard that the monsters once called it something else, but he couldn't remember what it was. It was coming up exactly next week, six days after Nomie and Mander's sixth birthday and three days after Arial's ninth. (In the Dreemurr household, the holiday season was a hectic time. Fortunately, his mom controlled that.)

"yAyA! thank u! go inside nao?"

"Yeah," Mander agreed, "right now." He snapped his boots to his board in rapid succession and pointed himself downwards with magic. "Hang on, Temmie."

"yAyAyAAAAAAAAA!" Temmie squealed as Mander went blazing down the hill along the route he planned, around trees and doing a triple backflip off the ramp just because he could, his brothers following behind and laughing. "tem... dizzy..." A rainbow-colored stream of shredded paper flakes and hairballs came pouring out of her mouth. "tem frew up." Laughing in surprise, Mander patted his snowsuit down before realizing it was dry. He'd never seen a monster hurl before.

"You're weird, Temmie," the little boy said, patting her on the head.

"I'm perfectly normal," Temmie said in a clear, lucid voice, twisting her head around to look him in the eye. "It's the rest of you who are weird." Startled, Mander unzipped it and flung her out with magic. Landing on her feet, she gave an unreadable expression before strutting up to the Dreemurr doorway.

"James, we're not going to get in trouble, like with the rabbit?" Gary asked. Last summer, he'd seen a rather scruffy-looking rabbit along the bike path one day and had gotten close enough to levitate it. With his siblings giving him advice, he'd brought it home, fed it vegetables, and let it go, whereupon it promptly started chewing up Grandpa's flower garden.

"She's a monster," James said, opening the door and letting her bound inside. "If she does anything really bad, she'll have to deal with Grandpa."

Temmie turned around, sticking out her tongue. "fluffybuns ALWAYS nice to TEM." All three boys burst out laughing. They'd never heard their grandfather called that before. "tem hungry! wan tEMMIE flakes!"

"We don't have cereal," Gary replied. His grandmother still wouldn't keep it in the house. "I can cook you up some burgers." Toriel had specifically given him free reign of the kitchen months ago. He knew what he was doing in there.

"no! TEMMIE FLAKES!"

"It's not human food," Mander told his brother. "She barfed up colored paper." He giggled again.

"can smell... yAyA!" Abruptly, Temmie rocketed down the hall towards the children's rooms. James pursued, but once she turned a corner she vanished. James sputtered in confusion before hearing a loud sound of ripping coming from his little sister's room. If this thing had gotten into Shelly's books-! He threw open the door. Michelle kept a stash of construction paper for school projects, and Temmie was clawing it apart, leaving papers scattered around the room and eating it by the bite. "yayA! unprocessed tEmmIE flakes! homeMADE!"

"That's not yours," James said, grabbing her by the scruff of her neck as she pouted. "Hey, I don't think we can leave her alone," he called back, making his littlest brother flop down onto the big couch in frustration. Mander had taken all that time to get ready and had just started to play outside, and now James was stuck babysitting Temmie and probably wouldn't let him go out by himself. Annoyed, he laid with his arm on the armrest, just above a pillow, which looked up at him, blinking.

"Gaaah!" Mander yelled, picking up the weirdly smiling Temmie from the couch. "There's two!"

Gary heard a clatter from under the kitchen sink and rushed to investigate. A pile of Temmies were crowded under the faucet. "There's more!" he yelled. "How'd they get in here?!" But he knew that was a silly question when he asked it. Monsters had their ways, and those ways didn't always involve Euclidean space.

Mander yelled again as he noticed what had happened to the Christmas tree. His father had freshly cut it down with his power, and the kids had enjoyed decorating it. Now the decorations were all over the floor, replaced by Temmies in the branches and a single Temmie where the star used to be, vibrating intensely. Other noises throughout the house- bedsprings creaking, furniture tumbling, the occasional clatter- suggested worse, and James rushed up the stairs when he heard the walk-in hair dryer turn on. Temmies whirled around in it, giggling, and they complained when he turned it off and ushered them out. He knew when it was time to call for help, and the skeleton picked up on the first ring. "Sans! Get in here now, we've got a problem!" he shouted, and James was sure that Sans could hear the shrieks of "yAyA! awwawa!" on his end as Temmies found other things to do. Sure enough, Sans came in the way the Temmies had, appearing in the center of the living room from nowhere. He looked around briefly, half-asleep, and all three boys were instantly certain that he wasn't going to do anything productive. Sometimes he did. Other times, not so much.

"Come on, Sans," Gary begged. "You've gotta help us."

"sure, I'll help, best way I know how." He pulled out his own phone and called their mother, who said she was almost home.

"Sans! Can't you at least tell them to get out of here?!" James shouted.

"sure. get out of here," he told one of the Temmies, who stuck her tongue out at him in response. Another Temmie leapt onto him and tried to make a home in his ribcage. "welp, that's about my limit. good luck. seeya." He vanished the way he came, leaving the confused Temmie falling to the floor.

"Oh yeah, that's a big help," James muttered. His dad had once used the words 'and then you escalate things' with him. He had very seldom seen any need to escalate things, but this looked like it fit the bill. "All right, Temmies- time to leave." He stuck out his finger and pointed a yellow laser at the nearest one at a sub-burning intensity. Abruptly, the Temmie twisted away and then tried to catch the yellow dot on the carpet. The other Temmies in the room followed suit, jumping on the little bright dot en masse. James, realizing instantly what to do, fired another laser at a different part of the room, and more Temmies, hearing the commotion and rushing from all over the house, bounding down stairs and throwing open doors, attacked the other dot, leaping off the walls to pounce on it. He fired more lasers, but he couldn't keep that kind of concentration up forever. "Open the door, quick!" he shouted, and Mander flew into action, opening the door to the foyer in an instant, his brother leading the Temmies right behind him. He threw the large outside door open with magic, and James laser-pointed the Temmie horde right out the door-

Just as his mother and sisters came walking up the path in their Dreemurr-fur Christmas finery, hair done and nails painted, unprepared for the weight of a hundred Temmies to descend upon them.

Of course, that was only about fifty pounds.

Nomie simply jumped into the air and stayed there, her dress fluttering in the wind. Michelle knelt down and protected her head against the rush. Arial leapt twenty feet to the left. Frisk, her reflexes completely undiminished by motherhood, stuttered out a rapid-fire chain of syllables, neutralizing relative momentum and canceling gravity within a roughly ten-meter radius, and the floating mass of Temmies spun end-over-end around her as she gently batted a few of them out of the way.

"SpaaaaaaaceOOMPH," one of the Temmies said, floating out of the zone and falling into a snowbank.

Frisk canceled the spell, letting the little creatures fall around her like a toy store accident, and her daughters clustered around her, brushing snow off their dresses. She gave a stern, motherly look to her boys, arms folded, managing to keep the smirk off her face. If she said anything, she'd burst out laughing.

"Mom! I didn't know you were there, I just wanted to lead them out!" James explained.

"We tried to invite one because she was cold," Gary added. "Not all of them."

Frisk let herself chuckle. "Inside, kids." She turned to the creatures. "Temmie, it's a week early. We told you there's no room for all of you yet. Temmas will be held in the school gym, remember?"

"but tEMMIE LIVs HERE!"

"No," Frisk explained patiently, knowing that the Temmies would never really understand, "some Temmies live here. Isn't that why you needed to come into our house? Because there's no room for all of you? Well, you're just going to have to crowd in a little more, or rent somebody else's space, because I'm not going to let you keep pestering my kids."

"You will regret this," one of the Temmies said, flicking her tail.

"That sounded an awful lot like 'I really want to meet your husband, please introduce me to him,'" Frisk replied, and the Temmies scattered off. Sighing and shaking her head, Frisk walked into her home, while James was trying to explain to a moderately annoyed Michelle what Temmie had done with her construction paper; she had plenty of the stuff, and she'd persevere. Arial was surveying the damage. The rampaging horde of Temmies had knocked over a lot of furniture and made a mess of the Christmas decorations, but the Dreemurrs didn't keep fragile objects lying around, not with six flying kids in the house.

"Okay, kids, come here and let me explain," Frisk said, sniffling a bit. They gathered around as she picked up a comfortable chair and sat down. "Most Temmies don't really have much of a concept of self. When you invite one Temmie, you invite all the Temmies. Almost every Temmie is Temmie, and Temmie is almost every Temmie. Not quite a hive mind, but- choo!- close."

"Mom, are you sick?" Arial asked.

"No, I think- snff- I'm allergic to Temmies. Which means it's time to get out the vacuum cleaners." She was glad her kids weren't allergic to anything. Asriel had made sure of that. "Let's all clean this place up."

"Us, too? We didn't cause this," Michelle complained.

"We didn't cause it either!" James replied.

"It's a family project, not a punishment," Frisk said. "It's Temmie's fault, and I don't think Temmie's going to remove Temmie dander."

"This is actually going to happen, isn't it?" Arial quietly asked as the others started hanging decorations back up and picking up furniture. She'd be a rememberer on her birthday in four days.

"Yeah, the first time, the boys were bored coming with us. Too much 'girl stuff'. So I left them at home, what's the worst that could happen, right?" She laughed despite her watering eyes and nose. Her kids, despite- or perhaps because of- their magical and genetic enhancements, always found ways to surprise her. As she aired out the house in the freezing December weather and went over corners and edges, one hand on the vacuum cleaner and the other with a handkerchief on her face, she was equal parts perturbed and dismayed, frustrated with the constant surprise annoyances of motherhood, and she would not have traded them for anything in the world.