Sans walked calmly through the long grass, head tilted upward as he enjoyed the feeling of the sun on his face. Despite all the things wrong with this place, there was something about being on the surface in the warm daylight that gave him some peace.
"That doesn't make any sense," Karak complained, walking beside him. "You're not from here, and I carried you into town while you were asleep. How could you possibly know a..." he trailed off, coming to a dead stop as he looked around with wide eyes. "Wait, what?"
His smile growing larger, Sans kept right on walking, closing his eyes.
Behind him, Karak sputtered. "But... but that's...! Sans, how did we get out here? You didn't tell me you could teleport!"
"i don't teleport," Sans corrected cheerily. "i take shortcuts. very efficient shortcuts."
"But..." Karak couldn't seem to find the right words for a second. "We didn't even go out the front door of the inn! The door leading to the hallway should not lead to exactly where I found you last night. How is that not teleporting?"
Sans just chuckled without responding, instead searching the area for signs of his machine. There wasn't much. A long, shallow ditch where all the grass had been forcibly uprooted marked where he'd landed, and a vague circle of soot showed the extent of the explosion, but as Karak had predicted, the machine itself was gone. He could see a few random bits and pieces of metal and wire here and there, but nothing he'd be able to get any information from.
"Don't just ignore me! That was like a fifteen minute walk going the other way. You teleported us!"
Sans shook his head, feigning disbelief. "what, you've never taken a shortcut through time and space before? weird." He gave Karak a wink.
Karak gave an exasperated sigh, but Sans could see he was smiling. "Fine. Whatever. Why'd you take us all the way over here?"
"figured i might as well check it out, just in case there was anything left." Sans shrugged. "more importantly, this is the only other place i've been here, and of the two spots i know in this world, this is the one that doesn't have any humans to avoid. which way are we going?"
"So you can only teleport places you've been before," Karak said thoughtfully. Before Sans could correct him or tease him about the terminology again, the boy continued, "The tower we're headed to is east of town, which is east of here. So we kind of went exactly the wrong direction, but that's okay."
"oops. sorry 'bout that." Sans shrugged with a smile. He could probably manage to shortcut back to outside the town gates if he tried, but it wouldn't be very precise, and there was no way of knowing who'd be standing there when they arrived.
Karak just shook his head and began to walk. "That's okay," he said again cheerfully. "That means we have time for more questions! Do you have anything you want to know about this place?"
"not really," Sans admitted lazily, following after him. "but if you want to talk, go ahead."
Karak happily took him up on his offer, describing in great detail the village where he grew up, his family (one sister and one brother, both younger, all living with their parents) and their few neighbors.
"My sister wanted to come with me out here," he mentioned at one point. "But I've always been the more adventurous of the two of us, so I already had a few levels by the time I left, just from wandering around running errands and hunting for my family and stuff. My dad says some people are just born to be adventurers, and as much as my sister wishes otherwise, she's just not cut out for that sort of lifestyle. I don't want her to get hurt, you know?"
Sans made a vague noise of acknowledgement, but he really only half listened to what Karak said, his thoughts mostly lingering on the sketches he'd carefully folded into an inside pocket of his jacket. They were probably useless to him at this point, but it was really the only thing he had left, as he rather doubted that this artifact thing would work.
His vague hopes of maybe trying to rebuild the machine were only scattered further when he thought to ask Karak about electricity and only got a blank stare in response.
"it's, uh, kinda like lightning, but you use it to power stuff like lights," the skeleton explained rather lamely.
"Lightning spells? Interesting. We sometimes use magic for lights, too, but usually not lightning magic," Karak commented, obviously not quite understanding. Sans didn't care enough to correct him, letting out a sigh as he imagined trying to get ahold of things like wires in a place like this.
"That wall you made last night was magic too, wasn't it?" Karak asked curiously. "How much MP does that take?"
That acronym was unfamiliar to him, but once Sans figured out that the boy wanted to know how much magic it used up to summon the bones, he shrugged. "not much, unless i summon a whole bunch at once, or use it for a long time." He pulled his left hand out of his pocket so he could materialize a white bone, twirling it carelessly between his fingers. "what about you? what's a kid like you doing carrying around a magic replenishing potion, anyway?"
Karak unsheathed his sword, still walking as he held it up. "Most of what I can do is sword stuff," he said easily, and he turned away from Sans enough to swing the blade in a vertical slash. As he did so, the sharp edge glowed and a white arc of bright light shot forward, traveling a good five meters before fizzling out. "But I also have a few magic items I found that let me do some fire attacks and stuff."
Sans nodded, idly tossing the bone into the air and letting it float there, spinning slowly. "ah. not many humans where i'm from use magic. the ones who do can be pretty powerful, but it's kinda rare."
"It's kind of the opposite here," Karak said. "Most monsters just claw at you or bite. Some have special attacks you have to watch out for, but other than that..." He shrugged. "I'm more of a melee fighter than anything else, though."
"I'm more of a pacifist than anything else," Sans joked.
"A freaking scary pacifist," Karak returned with a grin. "I'd probably classify you as a mage, if you weren't a skeleton."
Sans just shrugged, and Karak began explaining the different "classes" people could train to be in his world. Normally, Sans would have been fascinated by how everything here worked and how it differed from his own world, but right at the moment, he was still too distracted by thoughts of Papyrus and home to let himself get particularly analytical about it.
As they neared town, Sans pulled up his hood, just in case any other humans spotted them. He could pass for human pretty easily at a distance, and to take advantage of that, the two decided to take a path that circled around the town instead of trying to go through it.
This route seemed to work well for them for a while, and Karak's rambling changed back into questions for Sans about what kinds of magic the monsters in his world had. Sans tried to answer honestly, but he didn't really feel much like talking.
"Oi!" The two came to a halt at the sound of someone calling out to them. Looking in the direction of the call, Sans could see a brown-haired human woman in a plain, ankle-length dress standing in a corn field fairly close to the road, waving a handkerchief at them. "Are you boys adventurers?"
Without hesitation, Karak turned and started jogging towards the woman. "We sure are! What's up? What can we help you with?"
Sans stayed on the road for a moment, staring after his new friend in amusement. So much for avoiding other humans along the way. Sans shrugged, chuckling to himself. He didn't particularly care if anyone found out he was a skeleton, so if Karak didn't worry about it, he sure wasn't about to.
"It's my barnyard," the woman said sadly as Karak approached, Sans trailing along slowly behind him. The woman gestured behind her across the field towards a large wooden building. "It's been totally invaded by spiders. I can't get anywhere near the place, and I haven't seen my poor cows for three days!"
"oh boy," Sans shoved his hands in his pockets with a grin, glancing away toward the building. "that's bad news. don't wanna mess with spiders."
"I know, right?" The woman didn't seem to be paying enough attention to think there was anything odd with Sans, and she put her hands on her hips. "They're horrible little things! Do you think you could do anything about it?"
Karak looked pumped. "Sure, no problem. We can take care of it. Right, Sans?"
"how big we talking?" That tended to be an important detail with spiders. Monsters like Muffet were hard to bargain with, but the little ones were strange creatures that sometimes did weird things like eat each other. They never spoke, but you could pretty much get them to do anything.
The woman held her hands up in front of her, indicating a length of a foot and a half or so. "About yea big. Y'know, the normal size for spiders."
Right. So somewhere in between the ones he knew how to deal with. Of course. He didn't know what else he was expecting.
Karak was already headed off towards the barn, and Sans followed amiably, though at a much more reasonable pace.
Once they were out of the woman's earshot, and Karak had realized he'd left Sans in the dust and waited for the skeleton to catch up, Sans grinned at him. "so. you go completely out of your way to help random people often, then?"
"Whenever I can," Karak confirmed. "Side quests give EXP. This one should be easy enough. Spiders are pretty low level."
"which makes them easy kills, i suppose?" Sans glanced sidelong at Karak.
Karak blinked, then gave an exasperated sigh, continuing to walk without looking at the skeleton. "Come on, Sans, are you going to get mad at me for stepping on flowers, too?" Before Sans could comment on a certain flower monster he knew, Karak went on, "They're pests. They invade places like this all the time and destroy things and their webs get everywhere. What else am I supposed to do, ask them nicely to leave and hope they'll decide not to try to bite my head off? I don't think they understand language."
Sans shook his head. "i'm not mad at you. and i'm not naïve, either. i know that not all problems can be solved without violence. but i'd never be able to live with myself if i didn't at least try mercy first whenever i could. you know?"
The boy thought about that for a long moment, until they finally reached the giant main doors of the barn, which had been left slightly ajar. He paused, staring into the darkness, where they could already see spider webs crisscrossing back and forth. "So what do you have in mind? Try relocating them? I mean, they've got legs, they'll just walk back." Karak's tone was no longer sarcastic, and he seemed to honestly be considering Sans' words. Really, he was a pretty good kid, all things considered.
"depends on what they want here," Sans said with a shrug. "probably not shelter, it's too warm for that. if they're just after the cows, we give em a better food source elsewhere. maybe i should go in first, see if they're less likely to attack me."
Karak shook his head. "No, better to go in together." His hand hovered hesitantly on his sword hilt for a second, but eventually, he let out a sigh, looking determined, and simply reached up to push the door further open, stepping inside. Sans stayed right behind him, keeping alert as he watched for spiders.
Despite the daylight shining in from upper floor windows and the open front door, the webs everywhere made it hard to see much in the shadows of the barn's stalls, especially toward the back of the room. Several dark shapes skittered to the corners as they entered.
"Hello?" Karak called out.
There was no reply, but they hadn't actually expected one. The rustling noises ceased, though, and the barn became eerily quiet. Sans glanced around, trying to estimate how many there were, but he couldn't really tell. "you have a way to light this place up better so we can see?" he asked softly. It wasn't that dark, really, but any extra light would help.
Karak shrugged, wandering nervously further inside. "I've got some fire spells, but I wouldn't want to accidentally set the whole barn on fire. Maybe there's something I could use to make a torch."
While he searched, Sans stepped into one of the stalls. In the corner, he spotted something small hiding behind a pile of hay, shaking. As he approached, it dashed up the wall to the top of the stall, and Sans finally got a good look at it. Dark black, thin and wiry, the spider glanced back at him with an unreadable look in its many eyes, then dropped down into the stall next to him, out of his sight.
Sans contemplated this. "well, they don't seem to be too aggressive," he commented aloud. They almost didn't act like monsters, he pondered to himself. They seemed more like the animals he'd encountered on the surface with Frisk. That didn't mean they weren't dangerous, but-
"Uhh, Sans?" The skeleton turned to see what Karak wanted, and froze as he realized that his way out of the stall was blocked off by a half dozen, one-foot-tall spiders, some descending slowly from the ceiling on strands of web and others coming steadily towards him on the floor and the walls of the stall. Beyond them, he could see Karak becoming equally surrounded.
One of the spiders lunged at Sans, and he threw his left arm above his head, activating his blue magic and twisting gravity upwards. The spiders in the air, including the ones on webs, plummeted to the ceiling, chittering angrily. The others on the walls and floor stumbled, thrown off by the change, but continued to press towards him, otherwise unaffected. They didn't care if the floor was now the ceiling, Sans realized, since they could climb on ceilings anyway.
Karak cried out in surprise, and Sans hastily slowed the boy's upward 'descent,' leaving him flailing in midair. He hadn't meant to hit Karak with his attack, but for now it kept the boy away from the spiders, so that worked out. For that matter, he might want to get himself up there, too. He jumped and pinged his own soul blue, falling out of the stall and away from the attackers.
Working quickly, Sans released his magic on the spiders he'd left behind on the floor, so they couldn't just purposely fall to attack him, and strengthened his hold on the ones on the ceiling for the same reason. Karak's mouth hung open, his arms and legs pin-wheeling slightly as he tried to figure out how to maneuver like this. "H-how...?"
Sans grinned. "ok, i take it back. they're definitely aggressive. oh, look, there's the cows." They hung along the back wall of the barn, five of them, cocooned in webs so tightly that he wouldn't have been able to tell what they were if the spiders hadn't left their heads mostly uncovered. One of the cows let out a bored moo.
"This is you doing this, isn't it?" Karak asked anxiously, turning to look at Sans as he held his arms out wide to either side, as though to keep his balance. "Cause if so, awesome, bu-Whoa! Look out!"
The spiders, those on the floor and on the ceiling, had started to climb the walls, and one near their level managed to launch itself directly at them. Sans caught it in his magic and sent it heavily to the ground. Two more tried their luck and met similar fates.
Still, they kept coming, jumping both at him and at Karak beside him, and it was all he could do to keep them back. Just how many of these spiders were there in here? It didn't help that once on the ground, they just went right back to climbing the walls.
"Hey, Sans..." The skeleton glanced over at Karak and raised an eyebrow when he saw that the boy had somehow managed to slowly spin himself upside down and was giving him a contemplative look and a smirk. "I just had the most ridiculous idea..."
Sans laughed, slamming a few more spiders out of the air. "yeah? let me hear it. can't get much more ridiculous than what we're already doing."
"Put us back on the ground," Karak suggested, gesturing 'up' towards it. He paused. "Uh, right side up, preferably. But then, can't you just throw the spiders up here? Then they won't be able to move, right? I mean, I can't seem to."
"not gunna work like that, kid," Sans replied, but all the same, he gestured at Karak to flip him around the right direction again, then started lowering them to the floor. It took less magic for him to hold other things with his blue magic than it took to hold himself, so he was perfectly willing to land again, even if it meant the spiders could attack them more easily. "these guys are pretty good at sticking themselves to things. i can only affect them while they're in the air."
Karak drew his sword. "Then I'll get them in the air." For a moment, Sans was alarmed, but the boy simply reached out and slid the blade underneath a surprised spider, deftly flipping it up off its feet. As soon as it lost contact with the ground, Sans pinged it blue and threw it halfway to the ceiling. By then, Karak already had another spider in the air, and Sans sent that one up, too.
"huh. not bad." Sans made sure Karak's feet were firmly planted on the floor before letting go of them both, then kept his eye out for spiders dropping from the ceiling, immediately pinging them and adding them to his "collection" in the center of the barn.
The spiders continued their assault, but now the two adventurers had a strategy. As the attacking forces grew smaller and smaller, the strange-looking swarm of hovering spiders became larger.
As it did, Sans's task grew increasingly more difficult. What he really needed was a gravity well of sorts, to keep them all together in the same spot. His magic didn't work that way, though; he had to individually change the gravity of each entity in this ball of spiders. So long as they didn't move around, that was fine, but all of them were trying desperately to escape his hold, shoving against each other to attempt to reach the walls, and each time, he had to adjust to shove them back toward the center.
Eventually, he managed to get them into a sort of pattern in the air, just far enough away from each other to prevent squirming, but not so far away that they were hitting the walls. After that, it was just a matter of rearranging them as Karak continued tossing spiders up for him.
"well," he huffed to Karak at one point, "now i know what a circus juggler feels like." He knew he was sweating pretty hard from the exertion.
In the end, there were only about two dozen spiders, at least that they could find without hacking through all of the webs in every corner. Karak opened the front door wider for Sans, who pulled his hood back up over his head and began maneuvering his spider ball outside. This proved more difficult than he'd initially thought, and by the time he got them out there, Karak had finished freeing the cows from their cocoons.
Sans could only imagine what this looked like to the woman still tending the field. A writhing cloud of black creatures emerging from the barn, followed by five terrified cows. He snickered, deliberately not paying attention to the fact that his hands were beginning to shake from holding this thing up so long. "great. so. now what?"
"Uhh, good question?" Karak shrugged, raising an eyebrow up at their handiwork. "I was right about one thing, though. That is ridiculous."
A spider chittered at the boy, and Sans laughed again. "you tell him, spider." It happened to be one that he had floating near him, so he reached out and patted its head affectionately. It tried to bite him, of course, but he was too quick to let it get away with that.
"There's a river fairly close by," Karak mentioned. "If we drop them in there, they'll float downstream away from here."
Sans eyed the ball of spiders. "that might not be very nice. i don't know if they can swim. hey, spiders, do you swim?" No response, of course, but just to be sure, he repeated the question in French. Then German. English with Wingdings, interestingly enough, made them all hiss threateningly at him, and he burst out laughing. "huh. even here, nobody trusts the man who speaks in hands."
"What languages were those?" Karak asked curiously. "I thought I recognized the sounds of some of that, but that last one was...?"
"never mind," Sans said wearily with a shake of his head. "in all seriousness, i gotta put this 'monstrosity' down pretty soon. it's heavy. we can try putting them on the other side of the river. if they can't swim, they won't be able to get back."
Karak pointed the way. "It's not too far from here. Just across the field, on the other side of those trees, I think."
Sans looked, judging the distance. Too far to walk, he decided. He'd never make it all the way with all these spiders in tow. "right," he mumbled. "well, thankfully, i know a shortcut."
He strode forward a short ways, stepping up to the river's banks and taking the spider ball along with him. Black spots began to dance in his vision, so he hurriedly twisted each spider's gravity to send them flying across the water. He didn't see whether or not they all made it, though, because a second later, his face met dirt.
"Sans!" He wasn't out for very long, as far as he could tell, before Karak knelt beside him, shaking his shoulder lightly and calling to him. "Sans, are you alright?" When Sans didn't answer, the boy started trying to roll him over onto his back.
Sans resisted the effort, groaning slightly. "'m fine," he insisted, keeping his head down as he feebly lifted one hand to wave him off. "it's super comfortable right here, you should try it."
Karak let out a sigh, both of relief and annoyance. "Sans, you should have told me you were low on MP! I have plenty of these, you know!" Sans didn't have to look up to know that the glass bottle being tapped against the side of his skull was another gross green potion.
"nooooo," he moaned, burying his face deeper into the soft, wet dirt. "just let me sleep..."
Now Karak's sigh was just one of annoyance. "I'm not going to bother asking how you can still talk with your whole face buried in mud... Come on, Sans, we need to get going. That lady will get worried about us."
"go on without me," Sans intoned melodramatically. "i'm going back to being the really lazy guy who doesn't do anything. it's much easier..."
Sans was half expecting it when Karak shoved him over onto his back, but he wasn't prepared for the boy to immediately pour the potion down his throat. Sans gagged, sitting up abruptly as he tried to keep from choking on the disgusting liquid. "why would you do that?!" he protested when he could breathe again.
Karak just smirked at him. "Feel better?"
He did, but he wasn't going to say as much. It was strange and unnatural to be so suddenly and completely awake after being that tired, and it almost made him want to lay back down in the mud and take a nap purely out of spite. It took him a moment to talk himself out of that urge, and in the end he only managed it because he knew he wouldn't actually be able to fall asleep now if he tried. "that stuff is terrible," he informed Karak. "you have deprived me of an excellent napping opportunity."
Shaking his head, Karak hauled Sans to his feet, almost knocking a slipper off. "You have mud all over your face."
Sans grinned, making a minimal effort to brush off his damp jacket. "inside my face, too. mostly in my nose. i guess now i have a dirty mind." He winked.
"You have no idea how weird that is," Karak chuckled, and he pointed down at the strange 'reversed' imprint Sans' skull had left in the river bank. "Seriously. Anyway, let's go collect our quest reward."
"oh. the spiders all got across?" Sans turned to look, a bit surprised to see that a lot of the spiders had wandered off already, heading mostly downriver. A few stood on the bank of the far side, chittering madly as they waded in the shallows. Any deeper than that, and they simply floated away. "huh. i actually didn't expect that to be quite so effective."
Karak grinned. "Yeah, it seems to have worked. Come on."
It didn't take too long to walk back through the trees to the field, and the two could soon see the woman standing with her cows in front of the barn, waiting for them. She looked up, smiled, and hurried forward to meet them. "Thank you!" she called as she approached. "My cows are all safe, and it's all thanks to you two!"
"It's no problem," Karak said modestly, and he casually leaned an arm on Sans' hooded head. "Sans here did most of the work."
"Thank you," she said again, looking between the two of them. Sans got the impression that she wanted to hug them both and was just barely restraining herself. "I can't even begin to say just how grateful I am. H-here. I don't have much, but please take this with my thanks."
Shyly, she dug out a small pouch and held it out to Karak. The boy accepted it with a smile, and as he did, Sans felt the unnerving sensation of his EXP increasing, though thankfully not quite enough to up his LV. He wasn't sure how he'd explain that to Papyrus if it had.
"You're very welcome," Karak told the young woman.
She hesitated a moment longer, then quickly stepped up to the boy, stood on tiptoe to reach him, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. Karak blushed and began to babble something, and while he was distracted, she turned to Sans and leaned down, pulling back his hood and kissing his forehead.
Sans laughed, and the woman froze, staring down at him with wide eyes as she finally registered the fact that underneath the mud on his face, he was distinctly not human. "Wait... you... you're..."
"not what you expected?" Sans winked at her, his grin becoming larger. "bone-chilling, isn't it? don't get too rattled, though, i'm not that scary." He let his eyelights go out.
"unless i want to be."
Karak smacked him lightly on the back of his head. "Sans, stop that."
"ow," Sans intoned, still grinning.
The woman had backed up a good meter away by now, her eyes never leaving Sans' face. "You... ah... Um, sorry! I, uh, don't mean to be rude, but I have to go now!"
"Wait!" Karak reached out towards her, but she was already running, hands clenched tightly in her skirts to free up her feet as she hurried away. Karak sighed. "You scared her off."
Sans was laughing so hard he doubled over. "i can just imagine what's going on in her head right now," he wheezed. "'did i just kiss a skeleton?' ha ha..."
Karak shook his head helplessly. "You know, when all this is done, nobody is going to believe me when I say I met a skeleton who was actually nice. Not because of the sheer impossibility of that statement, but because you keep purposely scaring the crap out of everyone you meet!"
"hey, now," Sans snickered. "that's not fair. i've only met two humans here so far."
"And you've done that to both of us!" Karak turned away, a chuckle escaping despite himself, and he reached out and dropped something on Sans' head. "Here."
Automatically, Sans caught it, looking it over. It was the pouch that the woman had given them, and inside were several coins of various shapes and colors. "oh. i don't need this." Sans tried to hand it back, but Karak had headed off towards the road again. He hurried to catch up. "seriously, karak. we use different currency back home, and nobody here is going to want to sell anything to a skeleton."
Karak shrugged. "But you earned it. I couldn't have done that without you, not peacefully anyway. I didn't even think there was a way to do that peacefully."
"you're the one who came up with the idea," Sans pointed out.
But Karak still refused to take the pouch from him, insisting that Sans deserved the reward, even if it served only as a memento. Eventually, Sans gave up, tucking the pouch into his jacket pocket alongside the makeshift blueprints.