Royal Scientist
It's getting warmer, suddenly. Sans is always cold, even freezing with his naked feet on the tiled floor, but the orange light curling through the air around him slowly takes that away now. It's making beads of sweat roll down his neck and forehead, his soul beating frantically in his chest. And the thing above him stares, its round, black eye caught by the movement.
"SA-N5, I presume." It has a sharp, scratchy voice that makes Sans wince and shudder, but it knows how to talk, so it must be a creator, too. How many are there that he didn't know about?
It bends down and forward, a long, slender hand with sharp fingers stretching towards him. Sans holds his breath and stands completely still. "Now that," and it points to the vibrating blue soul in Sans' chest, "that seems much more interesting than I was lead to believe."
The face is smiling now, Sans thinks, but it's hard for him to read. One of its eyes is small and droopy, the other big and round, thin glass rectangles sitting in front of them. Its smooth, white skin barely moves as it speaks. But the mouth is curling up, that's good, that can only be a smile. Sans smiles back, even though he's twitchy and shaky and bites his tongue with his crooked tooth before he manages it. There is a faint orange glow on his soul, just at the corners, that's what feels so warm and it makes him want to run and jump and do ten different things at the same time.
The thing stops looking at Sans' soul for a bit and now stares at his face instead. Its head moves to side, like Alphys' did when she was curious. The words it grumbles now are deep and quiet and all jumbled together, but it sounds a little like questions. And then answers. Is it talking to itself? Sans didn't know you could do that.
With a quick shake of its head, it kneels down all the way, crouching right in front of Sans and moving its hand closer towards his chest again. Sans jerks back just a little at the sudden movement, but as long as he's not getting any instructions, he'll try to just stay where he is. He doesn't really know why, but this creator seems important.
The hand is covered by a light plastic glove, the same kind the other creators wear when they do tests on him. He has just enough time to notice that before the fingers reach his chest ‒ and then keep going. Through his skin. Into his chest.
All the air in his lungs is suddenly punched out of him. He wheezes and doubles over, but another hand grabs his upper arm and holds him in place. Gasping and panting in his search for breath, he feels his own hands cling to the creator's black coat, pulling on the fabric, desperately searching for support to keep himself upright.
The fingers moving through the hole in his chest hurt much worse than the needles, they feel like burning and freezing at the same time. Bile rises up his throat, something hot drips from the corner of his mouth. He curls in on himself as much as he can, trying to cough and failing miserably as he can't take a proper breath. His feet start slipping away from under him, losing all feeling and the hand on his arm is the only thing keeping him from falling.
When the fingers reach his soul, loosely wrapping around it, everything goes white. A resounding crack echoes through his ears, his back arches violently and hot, scalding pain shoots through his skull. He feels his eyes roll back in his head, a warm metal taste spreads through his mouth and the hot liquid spills out from his face, dripping from his nose and his ears.
For a second, he feels like he is knocked into the void, before he immediately snaps back and sees orange, feels himself being burned from the inside and hears a brutal, screeching sound that's being ripped out of his own throat. His flailing hands abruptly find hold in front of him, pressing flat against the creator's chest. Somehow, through all the blinding pain, he feels the soft presence of a frail, white soul below his hands, tinted orange on the inside and glowing steadily.
There is no decision, absolutely no coherent thought on his part. The moment he finds the soul, his own pushes hard against the grip, sends pulsing magic through his limbs and then ‒
~ Ting.
The pain stops. The hand is gone, the terrible screaming is gone. Sans doesn't even pay attention to the loud crash in front of him as the creator is slammed hard into the ground; he just stumbles backwards and down to the floor, barely able to sit upright, and hides away his soul behind his hands. Droplets of red and blue liquid lazily roll from his face onto his legs and the metallic taste makes him want to puke, but he focuses on breathing steadily, trying to ignore the rest. The lab looks blurry and much darker than before.
A new sound starts up suddenly. Quiet gasping turns into a series of small breaths, louder and louder, until Sans recognizes it: It's chuckling. Then laughing. Confused, he looks down at the floor in front of him, where the creator is pushing himself up on his elbows, his hand feeling around on the floor in search for his glasses. Sans can't do anything but watch, can't even begin to panic over the thought that he just used his magic to hurt a creator. His mind is all fuzzy and numb, not one thought manages to form completely before it turns to dust.
With his laughter turning into a small cough, the creator fumbles the glasses back onto his face and jumps into a crouch, his face shining brightly with a big smile. "Blue magic, brilliant!" As if nothing happened at all, he straightens up and begins pacing, freeing his hand from the glove and snapping it somewhere behind him; judging from the sound, it takes some glass equipment down with it. "It's not dead after all! Amazing, absolutely astonishing, how did the idiots even manage that?" With one hand, he grabs a small black cube from his pocket and taps it a few times ‒ Sans thinks it's a "beeper", but he doesn't know what it does ‒ then swivels around and points at Sans with the other. "That was great. Just like that, ting-wham-splat, love it. Oh, however ‒"
His eyes glow orange and with a pang, Sans' soul follows suit. The creator smiles, his voice turns cold. "Do not ever attack me again."
His orange soul wants him to move, but Sans can't, his muscles are screaming in protest even at the mere idea of moving. From one second to the next, everything hurts, the sound of a number ticking down echoes in his head, then he falls backwards.
Just before he falls, he sees the creator hastily pull his hand away and raising his eyebrows in surprise. Then Sans' eyes fall closed and he sinks into blackness.
Gaster stares at the unconscious experiment, knocked down to zero point one health after just one measly attack. He rubs the back of his neck awkwardly. "Whoops."
Freeda knows full well that not everything revolves around her, but on a day like this, she can't help but think that the universe is purposely out to get her. It started with the really depressing realization that their independent work of the last half year is complete and utter garbage. Then her granddaughter decided to steal her code and go gallivanting through a high security facility in the middle of the night. And now, just after Freeda, her son and his wife managed to catch the troublemaker and drag her back to the CORE scientist housing complex, the emergency beeper goes off. "Idiot shaming, lab 2" is all it says, and while Gaster does call them idiots fairly often, he doesn't usually employ quite that much snark in his emergency calls. So it's safe to assume that this one will be big.
Grynn and Pollard stumble into the elevator at the same time as her, both obviously just fallen out of bed, looking appropriately disgruntled and unkempt. Freeda crosses her arms and looks past them, unwilling to participate in the argument that is sure to come.
"So, who screwed up?" Pollard starts as if on cue. "You were in charge of the magic decompression field generator, right? Did you forget to turn it on?"
"Yes, Pollard, seeing as I'm completely incapable of rational thought, it is naturally I that screwed up one of the most fundamental maintenance tasks that I perform every day. You got me." Grynn isn't even wearing her lab coat or her trademark thick eyeliner, which makes her look three times as tired and annoyed as she probably is.
"Well, it has to be something really stupid, or he wouldn't have phrased it like that."
"And because it's something really stupid, it has to be my fault?" She snorts a fake laugh and shakes her head. "Your lack of self-awareness never ceases to astound me."
Freeda presses the button for the third floor, even though it's already been pressed. Maybe the irrational gesture, conveying her urgent desire to reach their goal, will be enough to let the others know she isn't in the mood for their bickering. But of course she is ignored and the elevator keeps moving at its usual slow pace.
"I'm just saying, you know, those maintenance things are very susceptible to mistakes, exactly because they're so boring and unchallenging. And you were the one in charge of that today, so."
"I was also the one in charge yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. Just as I have been most of the time. Now tell me about the last time any of these tasks got screwed up?"
"Look, that isn't fair, I was really new back then and I didn't ‒"
"Thank you, case closed, now shut up." Grynn crosses her arms as well, looks past Pollard demonstratively and lets herself fall against the elevator wall. Pollard huffs indignantly and stares at nothing.
Freeda presses the button three more times.
The awkwardness of the silence between them dissipates the very moment they reach their goal and the elevator doors slide open. Most of the lights in the corridor are turned off and only one or two flickering bulbs farther down still produce the green energy-saving lighting that most of the complex switches to after hours. The doors to Laboratory 2 are right in front of them ‒ and wide open. The keypad hanging next to it blinks a red warning light through the darkness.
"What's going on?" Pollard asks hesitantly, his hands somehow finding its way onto Freeda's shoulder and the crook of Grynn's arm. "Should we call security?"
Freeda slowly tilts her head to the side in thought. This looks like some kind of power outage, which happens a lot in underground due to the Magic Emission ‒ or ME for short ‒ but it's odd that the emergency generator apparently didn't jump in. Still, she shrugs off Pollard's hand and steps out into the corridor. "If that was necessary, I'm sure Wing Ding took care of it already," she says, waving at her colleagues to follow her. "Let's see what this is about."
The lab is dark and silent when they enter. She would have expected Gaster to be at work in the magic quarantine chamber of the lab, as usual, but a quick look tells her that the room behind the glass door is empty. Wind Ding's signature orange magic is nowhere to be seen.
She hears Grynn reaching for her pager. "I'll ask him where he is," she informs them and begins tapping away on the thing. "Maybe he forgot he called us and ran off to fix the problem by himself."
"That does kinda sound like him," Pollard mumbles, then straightens up a bit and finally steps out from behind Grynn's back. "There is an emergency light switch in here somewhere, right?"
Freeda points behind him to the wall. "Next to the door, but it's out of order."
Of course Pollard still walks over and tries switching it on three times in a row. "Damn." He stuffs his hands in his pockets and nervously looks around.
As Freeda begins walking farther into the lab, a strange sensation overcomes her. "There is magical residue here," she informs the other two. Being able to feel differences in magic emissions more accurately is one advantage of being much older than them. "And it's not Wing Ding's magic." Grynn and Pollard make some unhappy noises behind her, but it doesn't sound very important, so she just keeps carefully walking around the first row of tables to get a better look at the rest of the lab. Glass crunches under her shoes with her next step and she looks down at a bunch of broken equipment on the floor. Even to her, this is beginning to feel ominous.
Grynn is right behind her and as the middle aisle comes into view for both of them, she releases a shocked breath. "Oh fuck!"
Freeda doesn't waste any time. With her soul quickly pounding in her chest, she runs the last few steps forward and kneels down next to Gaster, lying lifeless on the floor. A small amount of white dust raises up in tiny clouds as she walks through it.
"Oh my God." Pollard's voice is panicked and muffled as he presses his hands to his mouth, stumbling backwards. "Oh God."
Grynn follows Freeda and kneels down on his other side. "Shit, is he dead?"
"Not enough dust for that," Freeda says shortly, though the fact that there is any dust at all still means that their boss is seriously injured at best ‒ and close to death at worst. She runs her hands over his sides along the ribcage, trying to read his soul, but she is not a healer and this has never been her strength. So it doesn't have to mean anything that she can't feel any of his soul energy right now. Somehow, when she speaks, her voice still comes out sounding hoarse and panicked. "Nothing. I'll keep checking, call for a healer immediately."
Her hands are shaking. Pollard sounds like he's about to throw up. Grynn types the medical emergency code into her pager and whispers one curse after another.
"Oh God, we killed him," Pollard moans, leaning heavily on a table. "We made some stupid mistake and now he's gonna die. Oh ‒ I... I think I'm gonna be sick..."
Freeda gestures for Grynn to help her turn Gaster over so she can reach his soul from a better angle. He's lying face down on the floor, the small pile of dust slowly dispersing into the air from around his head. Just as they're about to grab him and roll him to his side, she suddenly feels magic prickling in the air again.
"Down!" she orders loudly, seizing Grynn by her collar and pulling her down with her, the very moment a glass beaker flies by over their heads, encased in blue magic. It crashes to the wall and shatters loudly, spraying glass everywhere.
Pollard tumbles to the ground unceremoniously and crawls over to them. "What the hell is happening?" he whines.
Freeda ignores him, reaching for her own magic and summoning a circle of her small, triangular bullets around her hand. She jumps to her feet, turning around warily and trying to determine the source of the magic. Grynn pushes Pollard between the two of them and he lets out a panicked, disgusted gurgle as he almost lands on Gaster's body, then she stands up and positions herself with her back to Freeda's. Together, they slowly circle around, waiting for another attack. Pollard in the meanwhile frantically calls for security again with his pager, five times in a row it seems.
Three test-tubes are catapulted off the table to their right and smashed to the floor next to them, then another beaker flies toward them from the opposite direction. Grynn and Freeda whirl around, easily avoiding the blue glowing projectiles, and send their own round of bullets sporadically in the direction the magic seems to be coming from, which is somewhere above them and to the left.
Something is not right at all. Those attacks were barely even aimed at them; the tubes simply fell straight to the ground. And blue magic? Nobody is even supposed to have that. Adrenalin is coursing through Freeda's body, telling her to react defensively to the attacks, but the gears in her head are still turning in their attempt to analyze the situation, and everything they come up with makes her more and more suspicious.
But before she can put her finger on it, Pollard lets out a shocked scream and the next second, orange magic bursts into the air between them, pushing all three of them back. As they're fighting to regain their balance, there are three small ~tings sounding through the room and just like that, Freeda feels her soul growing heavy, dragging her down to meet the floor. Her glasses shatter at the impact.
The laughter she hears next fills her with relief at first, then with seething anger.
"HA!" Gaster yells as he jumps to his feet and loudly claps his hands. "Get dunked on!"
Freeda drags herself back to her feet with a painful grunt, hand pressed against her forehead. She is just about ready to give the Royal Scientist the tongue-lashing of a lifetime ‒ but what she sees when her vision clears enough to make out details stops her short and just has her staring ahead in utter confusion.
SA-N5 is climbing down from behind a vent in the wall, assisted by Gaster, who catches the experiment, sets it down next to him and then holds out his hand to it. "And high five! Just like we practiced." Freeda feels her jaw drop as SA-N5 giggles, gives Gaster a high five and jumps up and down, grinning from ear to ear.
As far as she can tell from what she sees out the corner of her eyes, her colleagues are not doing any better than her. "What?" Pollard asks. "What is ‒ what? I'm... What?"
"What he said," Grynn drones, numbly staring at their "failed" experiment; it's breathing hard, sweat on its brow and swaying a bit on its feet, but it's holding on to the pant leg of their boss and smiling up at him.
Their boss who, as Freeda notices now, has actual dust trickling down from his forehead. "Wing Ding," she starts forcibly calm, "did you cut up your own soul just for the sake of a stupid prank?"
"No, that would be irresponsible and borderline psychotic," Gaster answers immediately, actually managing to sound truly offended. "I did, however, smear some fake dust on my head in order to play an awesome prank on three complete dimwits who deserve no better." He grabs a handful of tissues from the nearest drawer and wipes the powder away from his head. "Made it myself actually, just last week. I was only waiting for an opportunity to try it out. Now," he throws the ball of tissues away again and it knocks over another beaker, "let's talk about how completely incompetent you three are at your jobs! That's always fun."
Freeda rubs her forehead, forcing herself to slowly count backwards from a hundred, while Grynn groans deeply, covering her face with her hands.
Pollard bends over, leaning on his knees and breathing hard. "I'll just ‒ I'm not sure, I might still throw up a bit." Then he lets himself drop to the floor like a sack of potatoes and buries his head in his arms.
In the time it takes the three scientist to regain their bearings, Gaster procures a blanket for Sans to sit on; the cold is slowly getting to the boy, making him shiver and chatter his teeth. His shiny white pupils still attentively follow Gaster through the room though, almost forcibly focused on him and apparently attempting to ignore the others. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that he is extremely wary of the three. The way his shoulders hunch up and his head drops down just a tiny bit whenever he notices them looking at him says much more than words.
It's going to be a lot of work to get his head on straight again. Gaster starts by positioning himself between Sans and the assistants, sat on a chair right next to the blanket so as to offer an illusion of protection. Dr. Grynn and Dr. Pollard are sitting slumped over their own chairs opposite to him, staring at the experiment and occasionally still shaking their heads or rubbing their eyes in disbelief. Freeda has her hands crossed behind her back, standing up straight next to them and looking right at Gaster, waiting for him to speak.
It's Dr. Pollard who starts speaking, though. "How did this happen?" he asks, the tone of complete helplessness making Gaster's skin crawl in his desire to slap some courage into the man. "I just, I don't even know where to start here. How did it get out?"
"Critical oversight of basic safety protocol?" Gaster offers, hands lying forcibly still on the knees of his crossed legs. "Crippling incompetence of the scientists in charge? I'm just brainstorming here, don't mind me." Despite his effort to keep relatively calm, he can't quite keep his foot from steadily rocking up and down.
"Laboratory 4 was opened from the outside roughly two hours ago, according to the security log," Freeda says, who can read his moods better than the others and knows when to offer facts instead of opinions and ‒ ugh ‒ feelings. "We are waiting for access to the camera feed."
Gaster starts at that. "Wait, you guys actually request permission from security to view the footage? You don't hack the cameras whenever you want?" He looks around between their faces, chuckling condescendingly. "Now that's almost cute."
Dr. Pollard immediately begins sweating heavily. "I, I guess we can go hack the cameras instead ‒"
"Great idea," Gaster interrupts, snapping his fingers mockingly. "It's always best to do your illegal information gathering when you know that security is looking at the exact same footage you wish to hack into at this very moment." He takes a second to stare Dr. Pollard down until the man's ears and whiskers are quivering so violently they look close to falling off, then he turns away to face the others. "Do it when you know for certain they're done. You will check all the recordings of Lab 4 since activation of this project. This" And he gestures to the child kneeling on the floor next to him, hands crossed protectively over his chest and staring up at him with wide eyes, "cannot be a new development."
Dr. Grynn jumps in as if she was only waiting for a chance to defend herself. "It never acted like that around us, Doctor. We're not stupid. If it had reacted to any of our attempts at communication, we would have properly documented that."
"Only if it reacted in a very specific way, I presume," Gaster retorts, unable to keep his fingers from angrily drumming on his knees any longer. "Tunnel vision, Dr. Grynn, has always been a problem of yours, as well as a lack of patience on your part, Dr. Pollard, and a frankly formidable indifference towards everything and everyone from you, Freeda."
"Wing Ding," Freeda intones warningly, the same way she would likely admonish a child for raising its voice against an elder.
"I did say 'idiot shaming,'" Gaster shrugs. "Don't act surprised about it."
Dr. Grynn lets out a heavy sigh. "Just tell us what we did wrong?"
"I want to say 'everything'. Sadly, that's not entirely correct, so I'm going with 'close to everything'. Still scathing enough, I believe. How exactly did you attempt communication? Because he was more than eager to share information with me as soon as I tried." He bends down quickly and snatches up the piece of paper that Sans was carrying. When he lifts it up from the blanket, the boy releases his grip on his own chest, his hands following the paper seemingly involuntarily. Gaster ignores the sad look on his face and the begging grabby motions he makes with his fingers, but files the information away for later use. He points to the word "sans" written on top of the paper in big, round letters. "When asked his designation, this was his reply. Notice anything weird about that?"
Freeda huffs and shakes her head in an unusual display of self-deprecating amusement. "Frankly, from our point of view, the fact that it knows how to write at all is confounding enough."
"It calls itself 'Sans'?" Dr. Grynn asks, squinting at the paper. "We never taught it that."
Dr. Pollard scratches his head and tries to inconspicuously hide his still twitching ears at the same time. "So, wait a moment. It actually came up with a name by itself? A creative deviation from its original designation, no less. That's ‒"
"An independent and creative cognitive process," Freeda jumps in. "That it concerns its own name is a sure sign of at least some level of self-awareness."
Gaster loudly claps his hands three times and the experiment jumps in surprise. "Gold star for you!" he says, calming Sans down quickly by thrusting the piece of paper back into his hands. The kid smiles up at him, bouncing up and down slightly and even shuffling a little closer to him. "Ugh," Gaster mumbles. "Sans, go back to drawing or something." Even though the boy must be incredibly tired, he still nods enthusiastically, picks up his pen and begins doodling all over the paper.
Dr. Pollard can't seem to take his eyes off of it. "It's aware?" he asks quietly. "Actually aware, I mean, like ‒ but that's far fetched, right? We made it to imitate natural behaviour, maybe that just turned out better than we thought possible?"
"Oh, yes, what was I thinking?" Gaster presses a hand to his chest and shakes his head as if he's ashamed. "Believing that a being with a functional soul might actually be considered alive, how asinine of me. Of course it's much more likely that it imitates thought processes, which are obviously visible for everyone and therefore easily imitated." He drops the act, pushes up his glasses and points menacingly at Dr. Pollard. "You're going to bed without a treat today, mister."
In his attempt to avoid the judging eyes of his boss, Dr. Pollard hunches up in his chair and looks around nervously, focusing on the paper in Sans' hand. Then he takes a quiet, sharp breath and slouches over even more.
Gaster leans back in his own chair, a very slow grin stretching across his face. "Dr. Pollard," he begins with a sickly sweet tone of voice. "What is that scent of shame and regret wafting through the air from your general direction? Surely this can't be a sign for a growing awareness of your own ineptitude?"
Groaning as all the attention focuses on him, Dr. Pollard buries his face in his hands. "I, uh, I don't ‒ I'm sorry." He takes a deep breath and sits up again, pointing at the picture Sans is doodling. It looks like some kind of animal. "There were a lot of drawings like that in the trash in Lab 4... I ‒ I thought maybe they were from Freeda's grandkid or something..."
Freeda grunts unhappily at that. "And I assumed they were from your children," she says dryly. "How unfortunate."
As Sans' pen movements slow down and he carefully looks up, obviously aware that his actions are being discussed right now. Gaster just folds his arms and keeps grinning dangerously. "This just keeps getting better. You know how all this might have been prevented? Crazy idea, but bear with me here: Communication."
And at last he managed to piss off Dr. Grynn it seems, as she finally jumps up from her chair and begins walking over to the blanket with decisive steps. "Alright, I know we screwed up," she says, grabbing the pen and paper and ignoring how Sans recoils from her, "but we tried communicating with it and it didn't work! Here." She hastily produces a very simplified drawing of a house and holds it out to Sans. "This is a house. Say 'house!'" Sans looks at her, wide eyed and intimidated, then at the drawing, then he very quickly flashes a look in Gaster's direction. Gaster remains neutral and simply watches him struggle with indecision. Just as the boy reluctantly starts moving his arms, probably intending to reach out towards the drawing, Dr. Grynn loses her patience, drops the paper and turns back to Gaster. "See? It doesn't even try."
Gaster looks at her in dead silence for a few seconds (five, to be exact, which is always just long enough to freak her out, but not so long that she believes she has a right to continue talking. There is a very intricate science to this.) Then he stands up abruptly, using his sheer height to make her back down and reign in her inappropriate anger. "I would at least somewhat excuse this with the fact that you're not a linguist, so you being in charge of an area so far removed from your expertise was a terrible idea in the first place. However," he takes the paper from her and turns away to crouch down to Sans' level, "I am not an expert in communication either and was still easily able to figure this out. Sans, do you know what this is?"
Sans nods timidly, looking back and forth between the drawing, Gaster and Dr. Grynn. It takes him a while again to work up the courage, but when he reaches out to the paper this time, Gaster passes it to him immediately and sits back patiently as Sans writes with trembling hands. While he works, the three scientists all edge a little closer, looking over his shoulder in fascination.
"Hows" is what he comes up with. Gaster holds it up for the others to read, then takes a second to correct the spelling and hands the paper back to Sans, who immediately begins practicing the word over and over again.
"Hm." Gaster pretends to rub his chin in thought. "Surprisingly, yelling at him to do the one thing you want him to do and at the same time ignoring his nonverbal cues did not lead to a successful communication. Who'd have thought?"
Not bothering to even look at his assistants, Gaster gets back up and slowly paces up and down while he rains words of condemnation down on them. It's more effective when they think he doesn't even really care, because it makes his harsh words sound less like personal insults and more like objective truths. Which, incidentally, they are. "Tunnel vision, people. Is it contagious now? Did Dr. Grynn infect everyone? If you had bothered to ask him questions and pay attention to his many different ways of answering, if you hadn't focused so much on him not doing the two things you wanted him to do and overlooked the ten other things he did instead, we could have actually been benefiting from this experiment months ago already."
Freeda nods during the following bout of silence. "That is correct."
"Come on, Freeda," Dr. Grynn hisses pleadingly, offended at her colleague's lack of integrity.
But of course Freeda remains unimpressed. "There is no point in defending our mistakes. We didn't take this project seriously and ended up neglecting it critically. If it hadn't developed enough initiative to leave the laboratory, we would never have ‒" Suddenly, she very atypically drifts off for a moment, before straightening her shoulders again and continuing with the same level of indifference. "I just realized how suspicious it is that at approximately the same time SA-N5 left its confines, my granddaughter was using my access codes to explore the facility without supervision."
Gaster throws his head back and bursts out into laughter. "Beautiful," he shouts. "Guys, this is the best idiot shaming we ever had. I'm having so much fun right now."
"Really?" Dr. Grynn sounds like she is about to cry at how ridiculous this all is. "You gave your fucking codes to your fucking grandkid, are you kidding me right now?"
"Obviously I did not give them to her, she watched me type it and remembered it, seeing as she is very talented with numbers."
The topic seems to have caught Sans' attention, as he suddenly begins bouncing on his knees again, excitedly writing something new and then waving the paper through the air. Already he is much more eager for the scientists' attention than he was at the very beginning of the conversation, and it just needed the tiniest bit of positive reinforcement. That, at least, is promising.
Dr. Pollard, who ended up standing closest to Sans, is taken aback slightly by the sudden enthusiasm. He looks around for help awkwardly as Sans starts pulling at his pant leg, looking up at him expectantly and continuously waving the paper around. "Uh, what is it ‒ I think SA-N5 is trying ‒ uh." Gaster stares at him darkly and waves the other two off as they start forward a bit to interfere. If the idiot still hasn't understood how he's supposed to treat these attempts at interaction, Gaster has no problem whatsoever giving him the boot right here and now.
Beads of sweat are forming on Dr. Pollard's brow, but he finally shifts his focus to the child at his leg, bends down and carefully looks at the paper, holding one edge of it between his fingers without taking it away from him. "Ah. That's. Hm. You ‒ you meant to spell 'Alphys', I think. It's A-L-P-H-Y-S."
Sans eagerly goes back to writing and spells the name correctly this time, showing it off with a proud grin. He circles the "A+" that is written on the page, pointing to it with his pen.
"Yes, uh, good, that's spelled right now. Oh, and there's an A+, look at that. Yeah, it's ‒ it's great." Dr. Pollard keeps looking at the experiment for a while, completely out of his element, before he pulls his leg away and turns back to his colleagues. "I'm confused now. Is it ‒ are we treating it like a child from now on? It acts more like one. And are we calling it 'it' or 'he'? This is so weird."
"He looks like a boy, so let's go with that," Gaster decides, waving a hand in Dr. Pollard's direction to shut him up as he opens his mouth at that. This is really no time to discuss gender politics. "And he responds well to being treated like an actual living being as opposed to an artificial soul, so doing that is going to get us better results. Logical thinking, guys! If that's as hard for you as it appears to be, I'm really starting to question your career choices. Anyways, onto the interesting stuff." With a loud snap of his fingers, he points right at the blue soul, which makes Sans scoot back a bit in fear. And yes, that particular reaction is probably due to Gaster's own misconduct. He never said he was above fallibility. "Blue magic. How the fuck did you let that one fly over your heads?"
"He never used it!" Dr. Grynn promptly returns to being indignant. "Not once. We did the BAS scans right after start-up, we documented the stats, everything. His magic levels are ‒ well, they should be too low to do anything with it."
"Incorrect," Gaster says. "Either the readings were wrong or the stats changed."
"It's his stats! They can't just change!" If there's one thing she's good at, it's being indignant. "And we did all the tests three times on the first day, not to mention all the pre-start-up readings ‒ across the board single values. One Attack, one Defense, one HP and one Magical Power. Those were the results, and yes we screwed up a lot here, but we're not so far gone that we can't reliably test for basic soul statistics."
"He used blue magic," Gaster says, speaking extra slowly to see her get even more angry. "Either the readings were wrong or the stats changed. Do you want to yell a bit more, see if it will warp reality into another version of itself where you are a capable scientist?"
He can see very clearly that she desperately wants to keep yelling, but even she knows better than to provoke him right now. With a slow sigh, he adjusts his glasses and turns back to addressing all of them at once. "Do the scans again tomorrow, after he recovered. The whole sneaking around, almost dying and then expending all the rest of his magic thing made him a bit tired, it seems." And he gestures towards Sans, who is now curled up in a corner of his blanket, clutching pen and paper to his chest and watching them all through eyes that are gradually falling shut.
"Huh," Dr. Pollard mumbles, scratching his neck. "Should we really just let him sleep instead of shutting him down properly? He could wake up any time." His hand freezes mid-scratch, his eyes growing round. "Wait. Speaking of shutting down ‒ what about the overloads? That, I mean, could that explain it? The fact that he can use magic?"
"Whatever are you on about?" Gaster asks.
"We shut him down by removing half of the magic essence from his soul and then re-injecting it to wake him up," is Dr. Pollard's rushed explanation. "He's been experiencing magic overloads during re-injection for the last weeks, which we assumed had to do with the rising ME levels."
"Magic Emission levels are regulated in the labs," Gaster slowly counters. "The rest of the CORE facility is susceptible to overloads and general malfunctions, yes, but the laboratories and the actual Core are isolated to keep as much magic out as possible. We'd be taking insane risks otherwise by just standing in the general vicinity of any technical equipment."
"Yes, exactly. There still is Magic Emission happening in the labs, of course, even if on a lower level than anywhere else. We assumed that he reacted this strongly to it because of his low stats; that for someone with just one Magical Power, even the tiniest bit of superfluous ME would cause an overload. That's ‒ that's not it, is it?"
Gaster tilts his head to the side with a small smile. "Well, someone's trying to win back their treat." He waves it off as Dr. Pollard begins to awkwardly stutter some half-formed apologies. "I didn't say you were wrong."
With Sans fast asleep now, Gaster can bend over him and take a closer look at the soul without scaring him. It only takes him a little while to find what he's looking for. "Heh," he breathes, straightening up again and folding his hands behind his back. "I'm calling it. The scans tomorrow will reveal a crazy increase in MP in this soul. See these fractures?" He points at the light blue streaks stretching across the skin of the deep blue heart. "We've seen similar tearing in souls that we injected with additional magic to increase MP, way back when most research was still about making monsters stronger instead of regulating their magic flow. These are a sure sign that the MP in this soul has grown, and at a rather quick and damaging pace no less."
"That doesn't make any sense," Dr. Grynn says confusedly. "We always injected the same amount of magic that was extracted beforehand, how could this lead to increased MP?"
It's like being back to teaching, Gaster thinks, and he hated teaching. "When does MP naturally grow in monsters?" he forces himself to ask calmly.
Dr. Grynn is not amused, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at him. "It doesn't, that's the point."
"Oh no, wrong again! You're not doing so well right now, Dr. Grynn, just a heads-up."
"Well, I mean," Dr. Pollard nervously jumps back in, "an increase in LV also leads to a growth of the remaining stats ‒"
"Yes, alright, technically that's correct, but let's assume for the moment that this toddler didn't kill a bunch of monsters while you weren't looking. When else does a soul grow?"
They helplessly exchange a few looks, before Dr. Pollard shrugs. "Before it's born?"
"Phew!" Gaster claps his hands a few times ‒ more quietly now, Sans has to sleep after all. "A right answer! Man, at this rate I'll run out of gold stars. I never had to use up more than two in a year with you guys."
Carried away by the subject matter, he begins pacing up and down at a faster rate, barely aware of the hand movements accompanying his words. "A soul grows and adapts in the time frame between its initial creation and the moment it completely fuses with its new body ‒ the moment it's 'born'. After that, yes, only LV can still change the stats. But this here is a different case, an unnatural one, and that is the key. You operated under the assumption that you were creating a finished soul, so you gave it the amount of magic you thought it should have according to its stats. Only that you were actually building a fetus, in the broadest sense. A monster fetus that is supposed to start with zero magic and that then naturally grows its own reserves. Anyone see what I'm getting at yet?"
Judging by Dr. Pollard's resigned little groan, he does. "It was still growing. We put a set number on all the other stats, but the soul 'wanted' to grow, basically. The only flexible variable in the blueprints of a human soul would be Magical Power, since humans don't have that."
"So the MP was the only statistic that could still change by itself," Freeda says. "Its magic has been steadily increasing this whole time. At a much higher rate than normal, too, because the soul expended all its energy on raising just one stat ‒ energy that is usually used for raising all four of them."
"Wait, wait." Even Dr. Grynn is finally catching on, it seems, as she rubs her forehead and frowns deeply. "Doesn't that also mean that every time we extracted some of the magic, the soul noticed the difference? It would have tried to even out the deficit, growing its magical reserves until they were the same as before. And then we re-injected the magic we removed and that's what caused the overloads. Because it already was at full capacity and we forced it to make room for even more."
"End result being: He has a fuck ton of magic." Gaster can't help but grin, his hands still dancing through the air as if on their own accord and forming the symbols correlating to his words. "Seriously, it's a miracle his soul didn't rip itself to shreds. Though it does look like it almost did every time you woke him up. The only reason he's still alive is the fact that his soul is still developing and has at least a tiny chance to adapt to this kind of ordeal. It might still kill him in the end, seeing as we don't know for how long it will keep developing and how much more MP it's going to build up."
Ashamed silence meets his last words and a bit of his own enthusiasm fades away at the realization that they could still lose this experiment entirely. He slows down to a stop and looks back up at his assistants. "I'm seriously inclined to take this project away from you entirely," he begins, letting a few seconds tick by for them to feel appropriately humiliated. "But, as it is, this just became a very high priority experiment. All of your incredibly cringe-worthy mistakes did, in the end, still lead to the revival of blue magic, so I'll probably not fire you. You are in the dog house, though! Starting tomorrow, I'm having you all wear dunce caps to work for at least the next year. Don't think I'm joking."
He has to bite the inside of his cheek to keep himself from laughing as their expressions franticly switch back and forth between relief, worry and doubt. "Well," he starts again as soon as he has himself under control, "as long as he's still alive and kicking, we should see to it that we get as much out of this as possible. This is incredibly good news in the end; we now have one more kind of Human Soul Magic to work with in order to fix the ME crisis. We will make good use of this."
Freeda pushes up her glasses. "I feel it is necessary at this point to bring up the ethical implications," she says. "We are, after all, forbidden by royal degree from experimenting on living, unwilling subjects."
Gaster makes sure to give each of them a very pointed look. "Well, I don't know about you," he says extra slowly, "but I feel like the whole 'living' thing is still debatable in this particular case. It is an artificial soul, after all."
Dr. Pollard looks confused and Gaster kind of wants to punch him. "You just spent the last fifteen minutes convincing us he's alive, what ‒" Then he notices the looks he's receiving from both his colleagues and his boss. He falters. "Oh. Uh. Never mind. Yes, very debatable."
Dr. Grynn shakes her head in annoyance and Gaster hurries up to keep talking.
"Asgore doesn't need to know about the details here, he'd just try to shut us down and this is too important to let that happen. I already made sure the security guards won't bother him with it." He flips a little gold coin from his pocket into the air and catches it again. "This is really only an internal matter for the science department, no need to go spreading it around. Freeda, we're going to have a chat with your granddaughter, bring her in tomorrow."
He doesn't wait for a reaction ‒ knowing Freeda, he won't get one from her anyways, even if it's about her family ‒ and instead turns to watch the sleeping child on the floor for a while. Deep in thought, he nudges up one corner of the blanket with his foot and flips it over, so that Sans is now covered by it and less likely to freeze to death. "It's crucial to let him sleep and replenish his energy for now, we don't want to put even more strain on his soul after all this. He will have to be monitored twenty-four-seven. I'm staying here tonight, starting tomorrow we'll work out a system."
Abruptly, he spins around again, staring the three of them down over the rims of his glasses. "In conclusion: You three suck. Starting right now, all of you are on probation. Any more mistakes on this and you're out. Out of this project, out of this job ‒ out of this field, if I have any say in it. And I do. You'll begin work on unraveling this cluster fuck tomorrow and you have one week to present me with everything that actually happened since project SA-N5 began. No more assumptions, no more tunnel vision. No more ignoring half of the data right in front of your eyes, for fuck's sake. Is that clear?"
He half expects their heads to detach from their necks with how quickly they nod their understanding.
"Good." He waves his hands dismissively, suppressing a tired sigh. "Idiot shaming done. For today at least."