Darkness.
"Hey! You! Are you okay?"
Darkness, and... something else. Flashes of orange and white.
"Can you hear me?"
But they didn't want to listen. The darkness was peaceful. Silent, silent as the grave.
"If you can hear me, then please..."
The darkness seemed to tense, to draw back.
"WAKE UP!"
Frisk gasped and sat up. There was a flowerbed beneath them, some of the cheerful bright yellow flowers composing it crushed and giving off a faint smell of sweet lemons. And the owner of the voice that had been calling to them...
A thin, vaguely skeletal figure floated in front of them, concern written all over its otherwise indistinguishable face.
"Are you okay? That fall you had looked pretty nasty! And, well, I had to make sure you were alive."
Frisk wasn't listening. Was this a ghost? Were they dreaming?
As if reading their thoughts, the figure answered.
"No, I am in fact not a ghost! My name is The Great..."
The figure hesitated, carefully choosing its words.
"Well, you can call me 'Buddy' for now. Now, I'm sure you're getting terribly bored of looking at these flowers. So let's go!"
Frisk stood up uncertainly. The dark tunnel ahead looked foreboding, but with their new friend "Buddy", it wasn't quite as scary as it would have been alone. They turned and walked into the waiting dark.
In the next room, there was a small patch of sunlight shining down from some unseen hole. Sitting in the middle of it was a single, unusually large buttercup, its head bowed. Its petals were torn and faded.
Frisk took a step forward uncertainly, then leapt back again as the flower whipped upward without warning. Its front had a face. A shadowed face, a face with only two bright pinpricks of light for eyes, but it was a face.
"Hey there. The name's Sunny the Buttercup."
BEGIN ARC ONE: NEUTRAL RUN
BEGIN SECTION ONE: THE RUINS