I.
Jailbreak arrived shortly, and she led them to a meeting room. Gene didn't come with.
Asgore studied her attire as they walked. She wore a simple crown, but he wasn't sure if that was because she was in charge or for some other reason. He had seen other people dressed as princesses earlier and their role had seemed purely ceremonial. Of the things they had worn, the crown was the only part that Jailbreak also wore. Instead of a frilly dress, she wore plain black clothing, and a technological-looking wrist sleeve. Her attire had the minimum necessary to still technically be royal. She certainly wasn't wearing the crown as a fashion statement.
The meeting room was an expensive-looking affair with a round table. They all sat down.
"So!" Jailbreak said. "I guess you're all a bit confused."
"You could say that," replied Asgore.
"I got worried right away when I saw Alex had installed a role-playing game. I guess we know how that goes now."
"Right."
He glanced sideways. Toriel looked conflicted. He could tell she was shifting into their old negotiation routine, while not being entirely happy with it.
The circumstances were unusual, to be sure, but they had gone through this setup together many times before. Asgore was the spokesman, but he didn't have Toriel's business sense. She would do most of the strategizing, relying on Asgore to put a face on it. She wasn't always the best at empathizing with others, acting in either a coddling or a cold way.
Her sense of duty won. She leaned over and whispered in his ear, while he listened attentively.
"What are our options?" he asked Jailbreak.
"Your options?" She pursed her lips. "You have to stay on alert for when your app is used, of course. But otherwise you can do whatever you want, within reason. There are some places you shouldn't disturb, but Textopolis is safe enough. There are people who can show you around."
"When our app is used? I was under the impression that it told some sort of story, and that that story is over now."
"Well, sure, but it can be replayed. You need to be ready for that."
Toriel chose to speak directly. "What would happen to us in that situation? If it started again, would we lose our memories?"
Frisk had been spinning in their chair, but they suddenly jerked to a halt.
"I don't know. Like I said, this is new to me."
II.
Papyrus was giving himself a grand tour of Textopolis. Sans followed along, keeping up quite well despite his short legs.
It wasn't long before they found a square lot with a graveyard, inhabited by a familiar face.
"Sans! Look over there!"
A skull with red dots in its eye sockets looked back at them. It was quite large, which made up for the lack of much of anything else in the way of a body. It seemed friendly.
"Could that be one of our relatives?"
"I dunno. Wanna go over and ask?"
Papyrus sprinted over. "Greetings! I am Papyrus! What is your name?"
It didn't say anything.
"Hmmmm. Don't you have a name? Or do you not have vocal cords?"
It nodded.
"I'm not sure that we have vocal cords, Papyrus."
"Well, nobody's perfect!"
He shook the skull's hand.
"It was very nice to meet you! I hope we see each other again!"
It kept staring at them as they walked away.
There was much to see. Papyrus talked puzzles with a jigsaw piece; spent a good hour looking at flags and asking them what they represented; stood on his head to talk to Upside-Down Face; drank tea with a teacup; asked an ice cube if they knew Ice-E; admired a red car; exchanged monologues with a supervillain; nearly fainted when he saw a walking plate of spaghetti; and finally met the sun.
On the whole, the two of them were having a pretty good time. Sans could get used to this.
III.
Alphys sat down at a table in the library.
She tried her best to ignore that some of the books in the bookcases around her were life-sized people. It was unnerving, but only in the way that everything was unnerving around here.
She pulled her phone from her pocket.
It was quite the contraption. She had cobbled it together from parts she found in the dump. Only most of them were from smartphones, and rarely of the same brand. The oldest part was at least fifty years older than the newest. The vibration was driven by something she believed came from a tractor, folded into a dimensional box. Some of its storage was on tape. And in a pinch, the radio transmitter was powerful enough to boil water.
The software was only slightly less of a mess. Its base was a free operating system from the 2060s, the source code of which had miraculously flushed down from the surface. It had shoddily written firmware patches to support everything she'd hooked up to it. It had an app for UnderNet, and another app to monitor the CORE. It had an emulator loaded with all the good titles in the Mew Mew Kiss Kissy Cutie dating simulation series. She regularly had to restore everything from a backup or reinstall it outright when she messed something up. The phone had endured a lot.
Having the phone while also being inside a phone herself raised some serious issues.
She opened a new text file and typed "Is anyone there?"
She closed her eyes and waited. If her phone had people inside it, what happened to them every time she reinstalled or wiped something? She had played games that featured phones - did those phones then also have people in them, and so on, infinitely deep? What if this "Alex" was himself a fictional character?
What if Mew Mew was real?
She opened her eyes. The message was still on the screen, unchanged, with the cursor blinking.
She tried entering emojis. She recorded a voice message. She took a picture of a written note.
Nothing happened.
She wasn't sure whether she was relieved or disappointed.
