A/N: I've recently noticed that I have a tendency to horribly screw over my OCs fate-wise, although I admit I'm not quite sure why. Regardless, I'm probably going to try to avoid that in this fic, if for no other reason than that I'm trying to write it as a counter to the darkness of my other main Undertale fic series Anomaly Cycle.
(Of course, don't take that to mean that this'll all be butterflies and sunshine. I know how effed up the fandom can get, and the word Cynicism is in the title for a reason.)
AUGUST 1, 2017
Joe sat on the edge of his older brother's bed, idly drumming his fingers along the wooden frame. He had tried to help with the coding, but after he had accidentally deleted several lines of code, Winston had started making his "I'm going to throw you out the window" face. Thus, wishing to avoid defenestration, the seven-year-old had determined to give himself a new assignment, which was to sit quietly and do nothing.
Despite not annoying Winston, however, doing nothing had the one major downside of being boring, and regarding his age Joe was even more vulnerable to boredom's clutches.
Winston was lying on his stomach on the carpet, laptop in front of him and the massive coding book to his side, opened to a page full of big words and strings of code. Joe had a larger vocabulary than most of his peers, one close to Winston's in fact, but even he had no idea what half of the text said.
"I'm boooooored," whined Joe, scuffing his heels against the already-scarred bedframe.
To his annoyance, Winston barely gave him a side glance. "Good for you."
"Did you even hear what I said?"
Winston didn't even bother to respond as he reached to his side to flip to the index, several hundred pages falling to the side and slamming into the cover. (Joe hadn't even known paper could make that kind of sound.) After a moment or two, he said, in a distracted tone, "If you want to be useful, keep being quiet."
With an annoyed sigh, Joe left the room. Winston's right eye followed him while his left stayed trained on the computer, but besides that he made no move to alter his brother's course.
Being a somewhat young child and easily distracted, it was several hours before Joe returned. When he did, he was surprised to see Winston messing with, of all things, MS Paint. "I thought you hated Paint!" exclaimed the former with no small surprise.
"It's the best thing we've got for spritework." replied Winston.
"Uh, what?" Joe scratched his head, thoroughly lost.
"I've got a plan." Winston explained, turning the computer for Joe to see what appeared to be a sprite of Frisk with a few pixels added to its height. "If we're gonna bring them to life, it's better if they get to know us rather than a generic yellow humanoid."
Unsure if that was racist, Joe watched as his brother pulled up a photograph of himself and copied his skin color onto Frisk. Deftly he erased their squinting eyes and replaced them with two vertical lines. Frowning, he shifted the left eye over a pixel before moving onto Frisk's shirt.
"Why are you making Frisk look like you?" asked Joe, brow furrowed.
"Fair enough, and I'll tell you." Altering Frisk's shirt to match his black hoodie, Winston continued, "It's because I'm gonna be Frisk. And you too, I guess." he added as an afterthought.
Joe still didn't understand what his brother was saying, which was vaguely humiliating. "Can you stop being so vague?" he demanded.
"They need to recognize us as not being enemies, okay?" Winston sighed. "So in order to do that, I'm gonna mod the game to have sprites of us instead of Frisk. Not sure how I'll mod the controls, but that's not important right now. Point is, we're gonna make sure they know us as us instead of Frisk, so that way when we drag them out of the game we'll all already be best buds. I don't want to reset, though, so I guess I'll just muck with the coding for their memories."
"That makes sense." Joe tapped the computer screen. "Can I make my own instead of you doing it for me?"
"That depends." Winston raised an eyebrow. "Are you going to be able to get the correct pixel size ratio so the sprite doesn't look off?"
"What?"
"Exactly."
Joe plopped down next to his brother and stared at the screen blankly. Neither of them said anything, and in the long run that was probably for the best.
Much later, two pixellated humanoids stood in an equally pixellated hallway, staring at a pixellated skeleton.
As he had said he would earlier, Winston had altered the coding, and with it everyone's memories, to remember two humans. He had also erased Toriel's memory of him calling her "mom"- no sense in doing so if it meant she wasn't going to be their mom in real life.
The two children's sprites were standing in the judgement hall. After some trial and error, Winston had procured a joystick for Joe to make things easier, and so far it seemed to be working. Winston was using the arrow keys, as always.
Sans finally spoke. "So you have finally arrived."
Course we have! thought Winston sarcastically. We know that, you fool!
The skeleton continued, "The end of your journeys are at hand. Soon you will face King Asgore... and... well, the end result won't be pleasant either way."
Winston pulled up the text box from the bottom of the screen and typed a response: What if we don't continue to the end of the game, and we just pull you out of the game and put you into real life?
The skeleton's shadowed sprite didn't move. "What... What do you mean by that? You... What?"
Winston was grinning maniacally as he typed again. I said what I meant and I meant what I said.
Joe felt himself growing nervous. "Uh, Winston, are you sure this..."
"Shush. I don't wanna mess this up."
Had either brother been wiser, or had Sans's facial expressions been visible, they would have realized that they were far, far past the point of messing up, but unfortunately that was not the case.
Whatever Sans had been expecting, it hadn't been this.
First, two humans had fallen. Humans who, for some reason, had grown kind of fuzzy in his memory. And now... what were they even talking about about? Taking him out of the game? What the hell were they going on about?
The taller human spoke again, face hidden in shadow, voice blank and devoid of emotion. "All this is just a game. None of this is real. And we sure don't know for sure what'll happen if you stay here. But if we pull you into the real world... the true world... then you can have an actual life. You can see the real stars. Everything will be wonderful."
Sans could barely comprehend what was happening. "This... isn't real?"
And yet, he had always had a sneaking suspicion, hadn't he? Distant echoes, weirdly anachronistic déjà vu... why couldn't those be signs that what this kid was saying was true? And didn't terms like "reset" sound like something that would better fit into a video game than real life?
And yet... he couldn't trust them.
He couldn't trust what they said.
"You're the Anomaly, aren't you?" Sans tried, doing his best to hide his growing, seething rage.
"An anomaly offering you a chance at true freedom." retorted the child. "If you won't accept our offer, we will simply find someone more willing to listen."
Perhaps they didn't mean it as menacingly as it sounded, but Sans only needed one second to flash to a panicked conclusion: Papyrus!
They're gonna go after Papyrus next, if they don't get me to agree. Sans realized, rage replaced by horror. Better for them to get me than him.
"Alright!" he cried out, hoping desperately that he didn't sound too frantic. "I'm in!"
Winston laughed quietly. "Alright, finally! Joe, pull up the 3D model I made and click the little gray button labeled 'Transfer' with that button on the top of the joystick. I'm gonna fix the projector up." With multiple exaggerated grunting noises, he began turning the oversized projector to point at the blank corner of his wall. He could hear Joe clicking around behind him, but ignored him. If I mess up the projector angle, Sans could have his proportions horribly skewed. This has only a small chance of working anyway, and I can't let that chance grow any smaller!
Sudden panic gripped him. What if we mess this up? Assuming Sans even survived, he'd sure as hell never trust us again, and he'd do everything in his power to ensure we couldn't pull anyone else out, even if we'd figured out what went wrong.
Well, too late to go back now! With a gentle tap, Winston set the projector running, casting its vague white beam upon the wall. "All systems go?" he called.
"It's got the little loading bar, so yeah?" Joe replied.
"Okay." A burst of exhilaration washed over Winston. "It's go time." In truth, he had no idea what 'go time' was, but it sounded really cool and he'd be damned if he passed up the chance to say it now.
The projector whirred, and the image of the skeleton began to appear against the wall.
"He, uh, looks kind of flat." Joe noted.
Winston waved a hand dismissively. "Wait for the resolution to get better."
Colors began to saturate, slowly growing less and less faded. The floating, glowing pinpricks in Sans's eyesockets began to appear, burning bright in stark contrast to the off-white of the skeleton's bones.
And then, with an anticlimactic rippling effect, it was over, and a projection of Sans the skeleton stood propped up against the wall with a slightly dazed expression.
"Did it work?" Joe was positively beaming, and tiny bursts of laughter kept escaping him. "Did it? Did it? Did it?"
Winston wanted to believe. He desperately wanted to believe that the procedure had worked properly, that he truly had brought Sans to life and that everything would be lovely again.
But instead, he found himself shuffling over to the skeleton and carefully examining the projection, ensuring not to block the beam. (He didn't know what would happen if he did, but if he had to take a wild guess, it wouldn't be good.) "How are you feeling, Sans?" he asked in a businesslike tone. "Missing any vital parts?"
"I feel... kind of... flat... and empty..." Sans's voice was raspy, and more high-pitched than fanon would have led Winston to believe. "What... did you do to me...?"
Winston's eyes widened, and he collapsed into maniacal laughter. "It worked! It worked! It actually effing worked! YEEEEESSSS!" he exalted, stretching his hands to each side and raising his head to the heavens.
"What... the hell... did you... do to me?" the skeleton managed, carefully flexing his phalanges. "I can't... feel... anything..."
"Oh, right." Winston waved a hand in the air. "You've got magic, and unless something went grievously wrong you should still have it. Just use that and solidify your body... but make sure you keep your clothing separately formed so it doesn't melt into you." he added as an afterthought.
"How do you expect me to do any of that?" snarled Sans, finally seeming to have caught his breath. "Magic doesn't work that way! I'd need an immense amount of energy, likely several thousand times what it takes to summon a few hundred magical bones, and I'd need to know how to do solidifying magic or whatever you'd call it... which I don't."
Silence reigned in the room for several moments. Surprisingly, it was Joe who broke it, with a melancholy "We didn't really think this through well, did we?"
"Shush, Penfold." snapped his brother, beginning to pace about the room. "We can fix this," he muttered, sounding more like he was trying to convince himself than anything else. "We just need to look at it from the right angle."
Having let Winston abdicate, silence instilled itself as the sole supreme monarch of the room once again. And none of the three in the room- humans and monster- dared break its rule, for fear of what might succeed it.