Policies of Negotiation

Standing frozen in momentary stillness, Gaster thinks. Instead of panicking, he prefers to plan, so while his subordinates look around in disbelief and growing anxiety, he is quietly formulating a strategy.

When he is done, Grynn already has half a notion to unplug Sans from all the machines and hide him away in a cupboard somewhere before the king arrives. Gaster slaps her on the wrist before she can do anything stupid like that ‒ as if Asgore wouldn't have the place searched ‒ and grabs a syringe with a fast working sedative from the drawer.

"Try to act somewhat like normal people, alright?" he quickly advises his wide-eyed gaggle of scientists. "And let me do the talking."

Sans watches him with interest like always. Even when he's scared, he's still curious, Gaster notes with a pleased smile. It's a very good premise for future research.

But he doesn't waste time dwelling on that now and administers a large dose of the sedative without further ado. Even before he throws the needle away, Sans' eyes glaze over already and his head drops down onto his chest. Just as Gaster has removed his gloves and thrown them on top of the needle in the trash, he hears the clicking of someone typing in their code at the door and he walks a few steps away from Sans, standing in the middle of the room and watching the door calmly.

It slides open not a second later to reveal the king of all monsters. Well, part of him, at least. Gaster really shouldn't laugh, but the fact that every single door in the underground is just too small for Asgore never stops being funny to him. He has to awkwardly duck his head and shuffle into the lab, the large horns on his head scraping along the frame as he goes. When he makes it inside and straightens up again, the little girl with the yellow scaled skin scurries in behind him, followed by her furious looking parents.

Gaster takes a step forward and bows his head a tiny bit. "Good morning your majesty. What an unexpected ‒ occurrence. Can I offer you anything?"

Asgore looks down at him. He is about the only person Gaster ever met who is actually taller than him and he doesn't like it much. At least he has the advantage of actually knowing the man and his soft personality, so he stopped being intimidated by his sheer size and muscle mass about ten seconds into their first meeting.

The others who don't get to meet him as often don't have that privilege. Somewhere behind him, Pollard is breathing louder and louder in his poor attempt to reign in the panic.

"Sadly," Asgore begins with genuine sadness in his deep voice, "I'm not here for a friendly chat, Dings." It seems as if he intends to keep talking, but then he looks past Gaster to the seat that Sans is strapped into, almost invisible behind all the cables and tubes that connect him to the beeping and blinking machines. Asgore's mouth drops open in shock and Gaster can see his Adam's apple jump up and down in his attempt to find his voice again. "Oh," he finally makes, the little sound hardly more than a breath. "I ‒ honestly, up to this moment, I was really hoping this was all just a misunderstanding."

The little girl ‒ Alphys was her name, Gaster believes ‒ steps forward hesitantly, only held back by her parents' hands on her shoulders. "Sans?" she asks with a quiver in her voice, trying hard to establish eye contact with Sans across the room.

"What?" says Gaster, turning around to look at the experiment as if he never saw it before. "Oh, that? Ah, I see, this probably looks like all kinds of bad for someone who doesn't know what's going on. Let me explain ‒"

"I don't need you to explain, Doctor," Asgore interrupts, his bearded face finally turning stern, bordering on angry. "I can very well see the situation for myself." He walks over to Sans with heavy steps, Grynn, Pollard and Freeda hastily making room for him as he bends down in front of the chair. The network of cables seems to intimidate him a little as he searches for a place to put his hands. In the end he settles them on the edge of the chair next to Sans' legs, then bends down and tries to look at the kid's face. "Hello child," he says low and gently. "My name is Asgore. Don't be afraid." When he doesn't receive any kind of response, he turns around towards Gaster and glares at him as best he can. "Release this child."

"I can't recommend doing that." Gaster still hasn't moved from his spot in the middle of the lab, right between the door and Sans' chair. Though in his attempt to keep an eye on both the king and the weird little family still standing in the doorway, he had to spin around himself a little. "It's kind of in a delicate position, yanking it out now would just damage it."

Asgore takes his eyes off of him before he finished talking ‒ rude! ‒ and glares at the three other scientists now. "Take this stuff off of him. Right now." Grynn, Pollard and Freeda exchange worried glances and then look at Gaster for help, which actually makes Asgore clench his fist in rising anger. "Don't look at him. I am your king and you will do as I say."

Luckily he doesn't see how Gaster still gives them the go ahead with a little wave, so he believes they actually listened to him when they come forward and carefully disconnect the cables. While they are busy, Gaster inconspicuously fumbles with the pager in his pocket.

Alphys wriggles out of her parents' grasp and Gaster watches her intently with narrowed eyes as she, too, approaches Sans, laying her hand on his and standing up on her tiptoes to try and look at him. Her parents follow her for a few steps, carefully assessing the situation with wary glances at both Gaster and the king.

"H-hi Sans," Alphys stutters worriedly. "Are you okay?" Unsurprisingly, there is no reaction. Gaster doubts the kid can even hear any of them right now. Alphys does not seem happy with this, however, as she reaches up to his shoulders and starts shaking him a little. "Please say something!" she begs, sounding close to crying. Sans' head lolls to the side and a bit of drool drops down his chin.

Freeda pushes Alphys back lightly. "Don't do that."

With a small hiccup, Alphys turns around to look at her parents, but she doesn't leave Sans' side and puts her hand back on his. "He wasn't like this!" she cries, causing her father to quickly step forward and pick her up, even though her gestures clearly suggest she doesn't want him to. "It's alright sweetheart," the mother mumbles to her and Gaster rolls his eyes and turns away from the display.

Unfortunately, that only has him meeting Asgore's furious look. "Gaster, so help me, if you have done any lasting damage to this child..."

"I haven't, and it's not a child. This might be hard to understand for someone without an academic background, so I'll try to make it simple ‒"

"I don't need scientific knowledge to see what's going on here!" Asgore waits until all the machinery is disconnected from Sans, then he very carefully picks him up, supporting his head with one giant hand as one would with a newborn. He watches the kid intently, searching for any sign of awareness, and raises his head to glare at Gaster when he doesn't find anything. "He's completely out of it, what in the world have you given him? Did you drug him? Did you drug a frigging toddler, Gaster?" He takes a deep breath after his little outburst and rubs his forehead, then looks at everyone with a very apologetic frown. "Please excuse my crass language, everyone. I'm very upset."

"Yeah, you better be sorry," Gaster says with a serious nod, crossing his arms over his chest. "I don't think I can talk to you if you're going to use such disgusting language. You should probably go lie down somewhere until you're calm enough to discuss this."

Asgore turns around with a snap, fully facing him and staring him down with a dark look in his usually gentle eyes. "Do you honestly not understand the position you're in?" he says, slowly raising his voice, which Gaster mostly finds fascinating; he didn't think the king was actually able to do that. "I am very much on the brink of never letting you set foot in this building again, and you really believe now is the best time to mock me!"

"Well, at least you noticed I was mocking you, I'm actually kind of proud of you for that," Gaster admits and then points at Sans, looking incredibly frail and tiny in Asgore's bulky arms. "Can you put the thing down, please? With the way you're jostling it you're going to knock something loose." They stare at each other for a second before Gaster's pager goes off and he breaks the tension to look at it. "Great, there seems to be some kind of trouble with the coolant system in complex C3, so if we could hurry this up a bit? It's not like you're actually going to fire me, so how about we just get on with the finger-wagging and put this whole thing behind us?"

It's like a storm cloud suddenly descends onto the lab. Like lightning, pure rage flashes in Asgore's eyes as he straightens his massive shoulders, drawing himself up to his full height for possibly the first time Gaster has ever seen. "Enough!" he shouts with a voice like thunder, making everyone but Gaster flinch in surprise and fear. He takes one step forward and it feels like the floor is shaking under his weight. "Wing Ding Gaster, do not try to talk your way out of this one. I can see you conducting illegal experiments on a child!"

"No you can't. I'm not doing any of that."

Asgore swipes his hand out aggressively and Grynn and Pollard actually jump backwards a bit. "Silence! This is an outrage! I have made it clear to you again and again that I do not condone this kind of disgusting conduct. You defy my direct orders, you lie right to my face and you have the gall to stand there and act like you are in the right!" Breathing in deeply through his nose, he closes his eyes for a moment and then opens them to look Gaster directly in the eyes. Uh-oh. "Gaster, I ‒"

"Oh, don't go there," Gaster quickly interrupts.

"I will go there if I have to," Asgore rumbles through clenched teeth.

"Well, you really don't have to!"

"Gaster!" he says warningly, his face dark and threatening. "I am" he pauses for another second, "so disappointed in you."

"Ugh," mumbles Gaster, dropping his head a little and pinching the bridge of his nose.

Alphys somehow managed to escape her father's hands and now stands close to Asgore, looking back and forth between Sans and Gaster. "What did you do to him?" she asks with a whiny voice that immediately grates on Gaster's nerves. "H-he isn't even l-looking at me. Sans! Can you hear me?"

The father puts a hand on her shoulder and glares at Freeda across the room. "This is a new low, even for you, mother," he says, apparently using the lull in conversation between Asgore and Gaster to butt in with his own insignificant opinions. "This is the kind of work you do here? The work that's so much more important than your own family?"

"You should refrain from passing judgment on a situation you don't even fully understand," Freeda coldly reprimands him.

"Don't start with that, we're not stupid," the mother snaps at her. "You're experimenting on children. How dare you involve my daughter in this!"

"Okay, wow," Gaster quickly cuts her off, clapping his hands to regain everyone's attention. "I don't know about you guys, but this is getting too disgustingly domestic for me to handle. How about you people take your family drama outside while ‒"

"Do not presume to be in a position of command right now," Asgore angrily interrupts him, though he seems to have mostly calmed down from his short episode of genuine wrath. "You have lost the privilege to decide what to do."

In his pocket, Gaster's pager beeps frantically again and he takes it out to quickly press a bunch of buttons. "Alright, fine," he mumbles. "That's completely fine. Core coolants are still on the fritz, apparently, and I'm stuck here without the privilege of command, this is simply wonderful." He lifts his head and smiles at the king sweetly. "Asgore, dear friend. I humbly propose to send the annoying people away so that the grown-ups can sort this out in a civilized manner. Doesn't that sound swell?"

Asgore shakes his head sadly. "Seeing all this, I am unfortunately starting to believe that actual civilized behaviour is beyond you." He turns to address Freeda and her family. "However, I would still ask you to please not argue over private matters right here and now. That should not be our priority when we have a child to take care of." Even though Sans has been little more than a puppet in his arms the whole time, Asgore still looks at him and keeps trying to communicate. "Who are your parents, small one?"

Alphys speaks up with a little sniff. "His name is Sans." She has gone very quiet, so that's at least one less annoyance in this whole situation. "I don't think he h-has parents."

"Ah, Sans. Thank you, little Alphys." This time though, Asgore doesn't try again to talk to Sans, he just looks at him sadly for a few moments and then lifts his head heavily. "Where did you get this child, Wing Ding? What did you do?"

Gaster snaps his fingers and points at him triumphantly. "See, there you go finally asking the right questions! Without even being aware of it, too. As it happens, I didn't do anything."

Grynn and Pollard visibly grow more nervous, probably expecting him to throw them under the bus, while Freeda simply stares ahead in her robotic manner, willing to accept whatever is to come next.

Asgore's glare on the other hand intensifies and Gaster hurries to wave his hand through the air in a hopefully calming manner. "At least not in the way you're no doubt imagining right now." He lifts his shoulders and chuckles, tilting his head to the side in a mockery of disbelief. "What, you think I stole a child from some unsuspecting pair of parents? Why of course, that absolutely sounds like something I would do! I probably went ahead and straight up murdered the parents, didn't I? And afterwards I just finished my everyday routine of hiding under children's beds in the night to feed off of their nightmares and steal all their candy when they're not looking."

"You don't like candy," Asgore says tiredly.

"Really." Gaster stares at him over the rim of his glasses. "That's the one thing on that list that you find a bit far-fetched? That's, you know, that's actually very interesting, says a lot of different things about the both of us. Not my point, though."

With a deep sigh, Asgore finally appears as if he folds into himself again, his instinct of slouching so as to not bump his horns against the ceiling making him seem smaller and rounder than he actually is. Still impressive, of course, but after having seen him fully angered and yelling, his usual way of carrying himself suddenly looks even less intimidating. "I do not think I can muster up the patience for this today." He is definitely tired now, almost resigned, and he waves the girl and her family towards the door with a slow gesture. "I will have security detain you four in here until I know Sans is properly taken care of. It should not be long, so please, behave. We will have a long talk after I return."

The parents seem incredibly relieved to be able to leave this place, while Alphys just clings to her mother's pant leg looking defeated. Asgore has to adjust his grip on Sans before he slowly starts moving towards the exit, paying a lot of attention to not jostling the child around, so the family is out of the door long before him. Before they have even fully turned around to watch Asgore while they wait for him, Gaster jumps forward and hastily punches his code into the keypad. The doors slide shut with a bang and the red emergency light on top flares up to signal a lock-down.

Asgore stops short and stares up at the light in surprise. "What ‒?"

"Wing Ding," Freeda says in a warning tone, as she and her colleagues exchange wary glances with each other. Gaster ignores her, as she'd only tell him how it was a bad idea to lock King Asgore in the lab with them and bla bla, nobody needs to hear that right now.

"Asgore, it's an artificial soul, not a child," he explains shortly, knowing he's slowly running out of time. "How about you listen to me instead of rushing ahead without having a single clue about what's actually going on."

Shaking his head sadly, Asgore gives him a long, somehow pitying look. "I don't know if you have anything to say I'd be willing to believe. Please stop stalling and open this door."

"I'd rather not talk about the nature of my work in front of people who have no business knowing about it and who are probably even more narrow-minded than what I already have to deal with here." Gaster stands with his back to the door, facing down the king with a determined frown. "It's artificial. As in, we grew it in the lab and it's therefore not an actual child. I realize it looks like one and that does funny things to your big cuddly heart, but just stop for a moment and think. What's more likely here, me kidnapping and drugging a random toddler or me working with the slightly uncanny result of an experiment?"

When his only answer is stoic silence, he knows he's on the right path. He carefully takes a step closer to the king, lowering his voice to make it sound more sincere. "Look at that soul, Asgore. Just the fact that it's visible should already tip you off. And you know what a color like that means. You know who killed the blue human soul and what happened to him, so how would you explain this?" Asgore stares at the deep blue soul in the chest of the unresponsive monster in his arms, finally taking a moment to look at the thing he'd been ignoring this whole time. When he slowly lifts his eyes again, Gaster has come even closer and meets his gaze head on.

"I made this," he lies insistently, ignoring the mixture of relief and discontent happening on the faces of his subordinates behind Asgore's back. "It's an imitation of a soul, but it's not real. Like a stuffed animal. Looks like an animal, but isn't one. It's that simple, and you're overreacting that much."

"Overreacting? I can't have any certainty about anything you tell me here! Even if all that is true, you still kept this a secret from me. This is the kind of shifty science that I don't want happening in my kingdom, as you well know."

Gaster throws his arms up in irritation. "Oh for fuck's sake," he groans. "Your definition of shifty is so immensely broad, how am I supposed to know what you consider good science and bad science? If we start like this, I'd have to ask for your approval every time I want to use a computer."

"Those have gotten rather disturbing over the years..."

"For the last time, computers aren't evil, you're just shit at dealing with them. No." He quickly holds up a hand to put an end to that particular topic. "Best not get into that again. It makes both of us very unhappy."

His beeper interrupts the conversation yet again and Gaster fishes it out of his pocket indignantly, but there is no time to read it. A sudden bang echoes through the halls from a distance, still loud enough to make everyone jump and look around in alarm.

"What was that?" Pollard has the time to yell, right before the entire room begins shaking. Gaster almost drops his pager and knocks a rack of test tubes off the counter in his search for balance, Grynn and Pollard fall backwards and hit their backs against the wall, while Freeda flails her short arms wildly before dropping to her knees. Asgore simply hunches down even more, bending his knees and leaning his upper body protectively over the child in his arms. The equipment on the tables rattles loudly, beakers and bottles drop to the floor and shatter, a rain of plaster trickles down the walls and from the ceiling.

It only lasts a short moment, but as soon as it is over, all the lights switch over to the red blinking emergency lighting and a loud, blaring alarm starts howling through the building. Every single pager in the room begins beeping frantically, their owners scrambling from all kinds of compromising positions to try and reach them. Freeda gets to hers first. "C3 coolant system is down," she announces with a tight voice, still sitting on the floor where she fell down and now hastily climbing back to her feet. "There was a minor explosion in generator room 21-C3."

"Emergency generator online," Gaster quickly jumps in, clicking through his own, more detailed distress call and already briskly walking towards the door, only losing his balance slightly from the aftershocks still shaking the floor. "Reactor 3 is approaching meltdown."

"Oh my God," Pollard wheezes, pushes himself off the wall and staggers to the exit with surprising speed. He lunges at the keypad, only for Gaster to snatch him back by his collar.

"Dr. Pollard, hold your position!" he hisses angrily, pushing him behind him. "No rushing off on your own, you'll just manage to make things even more broken."

"The housing complex is next to C3!" Pollard yells back, shaking in fear and panic and fruitlessly trying to escape Gaster's grip. "My family's in there!"

"They'll have ordered an emergency evacuation already," Grynn says, a hand pressed to her chest and breathing heavily. With the other she now grabs onto Pollard's wildly swinging arm and holds onto it. "Calm the fuck down! We need to evacuate, too."

"And let the reactor go down, Dr. Grynn?" Gaster snorts derisively, forced to raise his voice as the alarm grows shrill and piercing. "Great idea. Won't have any repercussions whatsoever, I'm certain. Who needs the Core, anyway? Just let it blow itself up!"

"What do we do, Dings?" Asgore asks with a surprisingly calm voice, straightening up again and shifting Sans around in his arms, until his head is lying on the king's shoulder and Asgore's hands are holding onto his legs.

Gaster takes a deep breath. "First of all, you put that thing down. We need to get to C3, either shut down the reactor manually or fix the coolant system. The experiment is less likely to take any damage if we leave it here."

Asgore actually nods and complies without protest, very carefully laying Sans back down on the chair. Gaster types his code into the keypad to release the lock-down, his three subordinates lining up behind him with varying degrees of control over their emotions. Pollard is a sweating, shaking mess already, while Grynn tries hard to remain calm but has some obvious trouble breathing. Freeda's hands are twitching and even though her expression remains stoic, her eyes are darting around in their sockets as she calculates the possibilities of multiple outcomes to the situation.

When the doors slide open, the little family of three is still standing on the other side, jumping back in surprise. The father is holding onto Alphys in his arms again and both the parents immediately begin bombarding Gaster with questions. Freeda is even faster than him in cutting them off. "No time," she snaps at them, grabs them both by their sleeves and pulls them with her back into the lab. "It's relatively safe here, please stay." She jumps out again and slams the door right in her son's scared looking face, typing in her own lock-down code.

Gaster is a tiny bit proud.

But she's right of course, there's no time, so he turns away without a comment and leads the way down the red lit corridor. Asgore is right next to him, a grim and resolute expression on his soft face. His steps are so long that he is constantly on the verge of overtaking Gaster, who is basically running. "Are the workers safe?" the king asks.

"No," Gaster simply says, checking his pager as he runs. He has to grab Asgore's arm and pull him down the right corridor when they pass by the elevators and the king heads right towards them, even though they automatically go out of order when the facility runs on emergency generator power.

The building keeps shaking ominously as they rush down the stairs, a dull hum sounding through the corridors along with the blaring of the sirens. Gaster silently curses the red blinking lights that make it hard to see, causing him to miss a step every once in a while and almost go tumbling down the stairs. He is only held upright by Asgore grabbing his elbow and pulling him back.

It turns into loud cursing the third time that happens. "Who the fuck thought this was a good idea? Yes, brilliant, turn off all the lights and just blink a bit of red every once in a while, that seems appropriate for an emergency. Never mind that you might actually need to see shit in order to fucking fix shit!"

"Will you please mind your language!" Asgore growls at him as they finally reach the correct floor.

"I don't mind my language, but I do mind the lighting. Not everyone has 20/20 vision and perfect depth perception, alright!" And he angrily points at his lazy eye, just as their little group stumbles out from the stairwell into the corridor.

They are greeted by absolute chaos. While the upper floors were almost completely deprived of life, a giant mass of workers and scientists is erratically moving through complex C3; it is, after all, the most densely populated floor, what with the cafeteria, break room and housing complex all being situated right here.

The noise level rises dramatically even above the shrill alarm sounds, as most people are yelling at each other, trying to communicate over the noise and only ending up contributing to it, while others are simply screaming or crying and making it all worse. The stream of people pushes away from the reactor, towards the exit that is too far away for anyone to even reach it in time. Just a small number of people remains that still attempts to swim against the current, to fight their way towards the reactor to try and fix things, or maybe to search for colleagues and family that are unaccounted for. A constant banging and clanging echoes all around them, the pipes in the walls and ceiling practically groaning from the strain of passing along cooling water from all over the CORE facility towards the problem area.

Asgore steps in front of them and pushes his massive body into the writhing sea of hysterical workers, trying to open up a path for them with his elbows, but even he is nearly swept away. "Please, everyone, calm down!" he shouts. "Proceed towards the exit in an orderly fashion!"

"Oh yes, please, chat with them a bit more, I'm sure that's gonna work," Gaster yells directly into his ear to even make himself be heard. Behind him, Grynn and Pollard hold onto Freeda's arms, keeping the tiny woman between them and desperately trying to save her from simply being trampled.

Another explosion rips through the air, much closer this time, the sound momentarily tuning out everything else. The shockwave rumbling through the corridor has people stumbling to the ground and against the walls, screaming and panting as they're being squeezed in between their colleagues and the hard concrete. Gaster has to cling with both hands to Asgore's ridiculous cape, and even then he is shoved back against the wall. The wind is knocked right out of him and he gasps for breath, the world going white in front of his eyes for a moment as somebody's elbow is rammed straight into his diaphragm. Only Asgore and Grynn, who are closest to him and had the presence of mind to grasp his arms and hold onto them, keep him from falling over and being swept away by the masses.

He doesn't take the time to entirely catch his breath. As soon as he has a foothold again, he casts out his magic over the sea of souls in front of him, forcing them to move away from him. Catching onto his strategy, Freeda quickly sends out a rain of her bullets, pushing people even further back in their instinctual desire to evade another monster's attacks. When the rumbling and shaking slowly subsides, Gaster and Freeda have carved a path for their group and now hurry up to move along before they lose control over the masses again.

Gaster is clutching his stomach, bending over a bit and breathing heavily while running, and neither Asgore nor Grynn let go of his arms. He would appreciate the gesture, if he wasn't too pissed off right now that he couldn't see whose fucking elbow that was so he can later fire the person it belonged to.

His fingers are clamped tightly around the pager in his pocket.

"What do we do?" Grynn finally asks when they reach the less lively part of the corridor, the part that everyone is running away from, where the droning and creaking and clanking is loud and stifling around them, where the air is humid and a thick with white fog clinging to the tiles. They can hear crackling fires somewhere and smell burning rubber and plastic. "Fix the coolant system or try to shut down the reactor?"

"We have to assess the situation first," Freeda answers, "figure out which of the two would take less time."

"How much do you think we have left?" asks Pollard with his annoyingly wavering voice. "Five minutes? Ten?"

"Depends on the severity of the damage," Gaster grunts, still wheezing a little. "I'd reckon three to five, judging by the fact that we had two explosions already."

"Where did those happen?" Asgore says quietly, inappropriately somber considering how they are running through the facility with pure adrenalin pumping through their bodies. "How many workers would have been close by?"

"Not too many," Gaster tries to reassure him a bit. "The generators overworked themselves trying to make up for the lost coolant pumps. Generator rooms on this side of the complex have only three to four technicians supervising them."

"Three to four," Asgore repeats hoarsely, as if Gaster just gave him a number with triple digits. "Do you think they survived?"

Gaster has absolutely no patience for this right now. "Well, I'm certain if they just closed their eyes and wished real hard, they had absolutely no trouble surviving a generator exploding right in their faces!"

Luckily, the following awkward silence is almost immediately broken when a group of technicians appears farther down the corridor, talking hectically and running to and fro between different rooms. One of them notices the scientists and the king approaching and runs toward them with a relieved yell. "Dr. Gaster, thank God! We're in the process of shutting down Reactor 3, but the SFP still requires cooling and we can't get the system back online." She walks alongside Gaster and passes her tablet over to him, which displays the current readings. "Boiling point was reached at 1106 hours," she continues as Gaster keeps hurrying along, tapping through the data on the tablet. "We'd be able to contain the release of radioactive elements inside the tanks, but the explosion ripped a hole through the wall! The entire section is impossible to seal off now."

Asgore seems to run out of patience as well as he barely lets the technician finish before asking "What does that mean?" in Gaster's direction.

"We have water pools cooling down the spent fuel. The water shields us from radiation, but without the extra coolant system it's heating up. If it boils off, we'll have a massive radiation leak since we can't even put the tanks into lock-down, due to a bloody hole in the wall apparently." He tosses the tablet back to the technician and then stops her short as she intends to keep following him. "Stop your colleagues from shutting down the reactor, right now. I want it powered up again in two minutes tops." She doesn't question him, doesn't even nod before turning around and running back to the other technicians, barking orders at them from afar already. Gaster snaps his fingers at his own subordinates and leads them in another direction, away from the fuel tanks and towards the coolant control room.

"We need the energy produced by Reactor 3," he explains unprompted to his confused followers. "Even if it stays offline, the fuels are still sitting there without cooling, so shutting it down won't solve anything. Fixing the coolant system is our only possibility to save this."

At the end of the corridor, three heavy steel doors lead in three different directions, with the generator room in the middle. Gaster hurries through the door on the left, entering the large octagonal hall that is the control room. In the middle of the hall, sealed off by a thick glass wall, sits the coolant pump; a metallic gray cylinder with a fifteen feet diameter, towering over them with a height of about sixty feet. The monitors and control panels in front of the glass are all powered down.

Pollard hastily walks forward and tries booting them up again, only for a command prompt to open up on the main monitor, spouting seemingly random lines of corrupted code for a few seconds, before blinking a general error message and immediately shutting off again. "What?" he cries dumbfounded, trying again with another panel, only to receive the exact same result. "That's, that's some kind of virus or something! How did we get a virus on these? That's impossible!"

"Obviously it isn't," Gaster says, stepping up next to him and trying to boot up the machines with his personal emergency clearance code. Of course it fails and he breathes out harshly through his nose, walking along the rounded walls to look into the pump room from the side. Grynn and Freeda join in with Pollard's continued and pointless attempts to turn any of the control panels back on and Asgore stands back fearfully, no doubt reinforced in his believe that computers are the work of the devil.

Somewhere behind them, in the room opposite of the control room, a deep hum growing louder and louder signals the restart of Reactor 3. Booting up the system now makes it emit a spray of sparks, before flashing the same code and error message and going offline again. "Shit!" yells Grynn, punching the panel closest to her and then pushing herself off the machine to turn towards Gaster. "We need to power up the pump manually, that's the only thing I can think of."

"It runs on the same system as these," Freeda counters. "Whatever virus is prohibiting our access, it will have that same effect on the direct control panels of the pump."

"With a significant delay though," Gaster says, staring at the part of the pump room that the others cannot see yet. It borders directly on the generator room to the right. The thick metal wall has a giant hole ripped into it and white steam is rolling through it. The opposite wall of the generator room must look just like this, because that steam is coming from the boiling water in the fuel pool right on its other side. "The main program is running directly over these computers and their signals are transferred to the pump software. Launching a command from the pump software directly skips the boot up process and give us a few seconds to negate the virus with the right command line."

"A command line we don't know" Pollard protests. "We'd have to analyze that virus first, that could take hours. We'll have reached complete reactor meltdown by that time!"

"Dings," Asgore begins urgently, "if this is a dead end, tell me now so we can evacuate."

"It's way too late for that. This is the main coolant pump, if we don't get this fixed, we'll lose one reactor after another until the whole facility is down. We could the closing our eyes and wishing trick to magically teleport all the way to Snowdin and we'd still die of radiation poisoning tomorrow when this thing explodes."

Grynn falls back against the wall, clutching her head with both hands and staring ahead. "Oh God, oh my fucking God," she breathes, finally giving into her panic. "What do we do, what do we do?"

Pollard starts frantically booting up one computer after another, typing in any command he knows during the short window of time when the prompt shows up and Freeda stares up at the monitors, obviously trying to memorize the code and take it apart in her head. Somehow, from somewhere, Asgore actually produced a paper bag and makes Grynn breathe into it, rubbing her back and mumbling soothing nonsense at her.

Gaster turns around sharply and looks at the monitors. His pager is in his hand already when it beeps again, informing him that one, the reactor is completely up and running again, and two, the cooling water in the fuel pools is completely burned off and radiation levels are now rising. The control room itself is safe for now, properly sealed off with security glass and air tight doors. The pump room behind the glass however is filling up with billowy steam clouds, ominous envoys of the invisible danger following them.

He straightens his shoulders decisively. "Dr. Pollard, give me your pager."

Luckily, Pollard is desperate enough to lunge at any sign that his boss finally knows what to do, so he doesn't waste any time in following the order he doesn't understand. Gaster holds the little device in his other hand for a moment, still watching the monitors and the code flashing across them, but then he looks down at his hands and programs the command line into Pollard's pager.

"Here," he says, tossing it back to him and then clutching the man's shoulder to turn him around and push him towards the decontamination chamber leading to the pump room. "That should give you full access. Type it in as quickly as you can, you have about thirty seconds."

Now, confusion does take over after all and Pollard looks at him over his shoulder. "How did you ‒?" he starts, before abruptly going silent and stopping in his tracks. "Oh," he says, staring past Gaster at the hole in the wall. "Oh no, Dr. Gaster. I-It's..." Giving up trying to find the words, he simply points at the damage.

Grynn claws her way back up the wall to see and then stands completely still as she slowly processes the meaning of the hole and the clouds. Freeda, too, stops in her tracks, but she is staring at Gaster instead, an unreadable expression in her eyes.

Asgore is confused. "What is it now?" He somehow manages to say this without sounding annoyed, but just genuinely worried.

With a long sigh, Gaster rubs his forehead. "The room is contaminated by now," he explains. "It's the radiation from the fuel pools. But somebody has to go in there and type in the code, there is no way around that."

With a violent jerk, Pollard tries to twist out of his grasp, but Gaster just clamps his hand down harder, digging his fingers into the man's shoulder. Pollard's eyes grow wide, his pupils shrinking down to little pinpricks and he clutches at Gaster's coat with both his hands. "No, no no no," he begs breathlessly, hunching down in front of Gaster and staring up at him frightfully. "Please, oh God, please don't do that, please don't do that to me ‒"

"For all we know, it could just be minor radiation," Gaster says, taking a step forward and pulling Pollard along with him, who trips over his own dragging feet and squirms around like a worm avoiding the fishing hook.

"Gaster, what are you doing!" Asgore yells, finally understanding fully what is happening, running up and stopping next to Gaster to grab hold of his hand, which is in turn holding onto Pollard. "This might kill him!"

"And it might not," Gaster counters, meeting Asgore's eyes resolutely. "It will, however, definitely save all of us."

"Please, please!" Pollard is tearing up now, almost falling to his knees in front of Gaster if it wasn't for his hand holding him up. "I-I have family, you know I have kids, please don't do this to me!"

"Let him go," growls Asgore. "The man has a wife and children!"

"A person's worth is not determined by how many people care about them," Gaster says coldly, "but by how much they are able to contribute to society." Still, he lets go of Pollard's shoulder and lets him fall to the floor, taking a step back and looking down on him. Pollard can barely keep himself upright, one hand pressed to his mouth and silently sobbing, his eyes still widened in horror.

Gaster turns around to face Asgore. "Do you wish to choose?" he asks calmly. "It can't be you or me, considering how important we are for the future of monsterkind. So, your choice then I suppose: Grynn, Pollard or Freeda?"

Asgore actually visibly recoils at hearing those words. He tumbles a step back, looking at Gaster as if seeing him for the first time. In the background, Grynn starts breathing heavily again, shifting ever so slightly towards the exit door. Freeda clasps her hands behind her back and doesn't turn her gaze away from Gaster.

"You might think to choose Freeda," Gaster continues, his tone of voice suggesting nothing but friendly advice. "She is old, after all. Not much time left anyway, so if we shorten it a bit, what does it matter?"

Asgore draws back even more, slowly shaking his head. "Stop."

"Hm?" Gaster tilts his head to the side. "Well, you're right of course, Freeda is still the most efficient lab worker I have, probably the only one of those three here completely deserving of her position. Dr. Grynn, then? No family to speak of there, no form of private attachment at all, as far as I'm aware. That is the currency in which we measure the worth of monster lives around here, is it not?"

"Fuck you," Grynn says quietly.

"Of course," Gaster carries on mercilessly, "she sucks at typing. Never seems to remember she has ten fingers to use. She'd never manage to type the whole line in only thirty seconds."

Asgore is completely avoiding his eyes by now, looking to the side on the floor and helplessly clenching his fists at his side.

Turning around slightly, Gaster looks at Pollard again. He is standing up from the floor at this very moment, knees shaking and whiskers quivering. The pager in his hand almost seems to get crushed in his grasp, but he lifts his head and meets Gaster's eyes.

There is no need to waste five seconds to stare him down. With a wave of his hand, Gaster directs him towards the decontamination chamber. "Get in there, Dr. Pollard." He keeps his voice a bit gentler than normally, but still makes sure to leave no room for arguments. "And don't screw it up."

Half expecting the nervous scientist to slump over and faint, Gaster can't help but be a tiny bit impressed when the man instead straightens his shoulders, breathes in deeply and spins around, his shaking knees hardly noticeable if one didn't already know they were there.

The room is deathly silent while Pollard enters the chamber and they all stand perfectly still, watching through the glass as the door to the control room is automatically sealed. Pollard only hesitates for one tiny second, then he presses the button to open the doors to the pump room. Pager tightly held in his hand, he runs across the metal catwalk to the side of the pump, opening the control panel. He is shaking now, very obviously too, and Gaster is really going to punch him if he mistypes the line now because of that.

While the program fires up, Grynn and Freeda inch closer toward the glass, watching intently. Grynn's fingers are wound around each other in front of her, clenching and unclenching, and Freeda must be calculating things again ‒ most likely the level of radiation in the room and the results of short-term exposure to that level. Gaster doesn't even try, it's all just speculation until they get the actual readings.

Pollard begins typing and his hands stay miraculously calm. The same command prompt from the monitors in the control room is flashing on the little panel behind the metal plating of the pump, but Gaster can even see from back here that its corruption is spreading much slower. Very quickly he glances to the side, but Asgore is just watching Pollard with a look of utter regret and guilt on his face. What else.

It takes less than fifteen seconds. Knowing that every extra minute spent at work might mean an even faster death seems to be a pretty effective motivator, Gaster notes, as Pollard rushes back over to the chamber, trembling from head to toe as he waits for the door to seal itself and the air in the chamber to be cleansed. Gaster isn't looking, he is instead booting up the controls inside the room again, grinning widely when it comes online without any trouble. "Success," he announces, grabbing a chair from nearby and sitting down to direct the reboot of the coolant system.

The door to the chamber springs open behind him and Pollard stumbles back into the room, falling right to his knees and proceeding to puke on the floor. Gaster gives him a quick look over his shoulder, just as the pump comes back online and the alarm finally stops blaring. Pollard is pale like a sheet of paper, sweaty and shaking, his hair clinging to his wet forehead and uncontrolled half-sobs tumbling out his mouth. Gaster waves at Grynn and Freeda. "See to it that he gets to medical. And keep your distance, obviously."

There is a bit of mumbling behind him as he turns back to the control panel. It takes a while for Pollard to get back to his feet without help, but he does manage after a bit and proceeds to shuffle out of the room, Grynn and Freeda walking along carefully and trying to keep their voices gentle as they warn him not to touch anything.

The sounds grow more and more distant, until they disappear completely. Even though Asgore doesn't say a single word and keeps completely still, Gaster can basically hear him judging him behind his back.

"So," he starts without turning around, "did you by chance see what happened here?"

A low, rumbling sigh escapes Asgore throat. "A terribly brave man risked his life to save us all." Heavy steps slowly approach until Gaster can see him standing to next to him out of the corner of his good eye. "But I have a feeling that's not what you saw."

Gaster decidedly keeps his attention on the program running on the monitors, but apart from a slight loss of power from the busted generators, everything runs smoothly again. "Well, I'd petition to at least put a little question mark behind the whole 'brave' thing. But you're right, that's not what I meant. What happened was that you were too much of a coward to make a decision crucial to our survival, so I made it for you without your permission. And now look at us, being all not dead."

After a long, long pause, Asgore sits down next to him, the chair creaking and groaning dangerously under his massive weight. "I still didn't like it," he says with a dull and sad voice.

Gaster snorts a laugh. "Of course not, that's my whole point." Finally he turns around to face him, pointing at the king's chest accusingly as he rants. "You're all soft and mushy on the inside and it keeps you from doing your bloody job, so I'm not apologizing for doing it for you. If I hadn't sent Pollard in there, we'd be dead now. If I hadn't decided to do experiments on an artificially created soul, we'd have no chance left to solve this crisis. The rest of the underground doesn't have alarms blaring and red lights flashing, and maybe that's why the severity of the situation hasn't settled into your fat head yet, but it's no less dire than what just happened in here."

It's a bit like yelling at a child, and while Gaster knows he isn't exactly a nice person, he still doesn't get any kind of satisfaction from something like that. Asgore looks kind of tiny with his hunched shoulders and grieving face, but Gaster knows he isn't done yet. He leans forward in his chair and puts both hands on Asgore's shoulders for good measure.

"Monsters die in your kingdom, Asgore." He speaks slowly and insistently, making sure not one word goes by unheard. "We're sitting here in the CORE and you in your castle, happy that we can barely be touched by the whole thing because I went through the trouble of isolating those places to make them safer. Never mind that this means we pump all of our ME away from here and into the rest of the underground, making it even more dangerous out there. I didn't do that so you could sit on your ass and pretend none of this is happening, I did that so the institutions needed for solving this stay alive and functional."

With an exhausted huff, Asgore rubs his giant hands over his bearded face. "Golly, you just can't take a break, my friend," he says in a dull attempt at good humor. "Don't you want to just take a breather after solving this one crisis? Do you have to go right back to our discussion of another one?"

"Well gosh diddly darn it Asgore, I'm just picking up where we left off." Gaster leans back again, pushes up his glasses and crosses his legs. "We're killing people already for this research. Humans, yes, but let's not pretend we're not both aware those are people, too. So how do you justify allowing that but at the same time drawing a line at experimentations with artificial souls? Which are, you know, not people."

Asgore actually slides down in his chair and groans loudly, his face completely covered by his hands. "Gosh, Dings. On what kind of fuel are you running? You just sent a man you worked with for years to what might well be his early grave! How do you have the energy to go right back to arguing?" He spreads his fingers apart a bit and looks at Gaster somberly through the gaps. "How are you not... feeling anything here?"

With a frown and a huff, Gaster makes a very rude gesture, half expecting Asgore to fall over from the scandal before remembering how bad the king is at speaking in hands. "Don't go down that route again," he says instead. "I'm not going to pretend to have the kind of emotional responses you expect me to have just so you can feel better. I don't have time for nonsense like that." He gives his own chest a quick, meaningful tap. "I probably don't have much time in general."

Asgore immediately sits up again, a level of grief on his face that still manages to catch Gaster off guard every time they talk about this. To stop the onslaught of pity and lament that is sure to come, he quickly raises his hands and shakes his head. "No, I still don't want time off and no, I'm still not depressed, stop treating me like someone who is in touch with his emotions, for fuck's sake. I'm saying that I need an alternative to complete this research, I can't keep taking the risk of experimenting on myself. You won't let me recruit Muffet ‒"

"It's not my place to order her to sell her soul."

"‒ whatever, let me finish, you won't give me Muffet, so I had to find another way to stay alive long enough to safe the world. Hence the artificial soul."

Asgore looks at him for a long time, leaning forward in his chair and hands folded over his knees. Then he shakes his head with a sad smile. "If that was your reasoning for all of this, then why in the world did you not tell me from the start?"

"Are you kidding me?" Gaster says dryly. "You saw the thing. It's small, it has big eyes and a baby face, of course you wouldn't have let me do experiments on it. You adopted the damn human because it looked cute, for fuck's sake."

"Language, please!"

"Fuck language."

Asgore's forehead creases into a small frown. "I'm serious. Don't use such words when talking about my child." Gaster simply rolls his eyes without an answer ‒ there's not much he can say here without sparking an argument ‒ and Asgore shakes his head once more. "You really thought I would forbid you from taking measures that could prolong your life?"

Gaster copies the king's frown and adds a touch of confusion. "You say that as if it's something you've never done, when ‒ you know. Muffet happened."

"That was a very different situation. It was about a living monster, a real soul. As much as I wish for you to live, I can't let you compromise another's safety and free will." He pauses and Gaster is curious enough to let him collect his thoughts in peace. "This ‒ artificial soul," he then begins anew, trying out the word like a new taste. "It cannot feel anything? It cannot think for itself?"

Gaster smiles a tiny smile. "Like I said. Think of ‒ an insect. That's perhaps more apt of a comparison than the stuffed animal thing I said before. It will notice pain, it will react to it. But it lacks the nervous system and the brain functions to actually feel anything about it. And I'm aware you even hate killing insects, but I'm hoping it's a price you'd be willing to pay for another chance at life for me and monsterkind."

A dry chuckle escapes Asgore as he rubs his face again, slowly getting up from his chair with creaking knees. "Well, now even I know you're manipulating me, seeing as one second ago the thought that I might not want to see you die was as alien to you as ‒ as you regretting the possible death of a colleague." He shakes his head once more, staring down at Gaster with that trademark look of sad, pitying resignation in his eyes. Gaster really doesn't like that look.

Then, Asgore drops a heavy hand on his bony shoulder, carefully, as if he's afraid to break something; he even has the audacity to pat him twice before taking it away again. "I will attempt to bring some order back into this chaos. Please give me a detailed report of that experiment at your earliest convenience so I can look it all over in peace. For now, though, you have my tentative allowance to continue as you wish with it."

When he's almost out the door, he turns around once more with a stern expression. "Visit your colleague. No matter what you think of him, he was a hero today."

"Yep," Gaster quietly agrees, when he can't hear Asgore's footsteps anymore and is sure that he's gone. "Because he did what I told him to do."

He has to stifle his laughter when he returns to Lab 1 about three hours later and is greeted by Freeda's furious family. Admittedly, he completely forgot they were locked in there and he usually doesn't like forgetting things, but this one has too hilarious of a result for him to feel bad about it.

The only damper on his mood is the realization that Sans was still in there with them, too, but it's only a short moment of worry; when the nagging parents finally make room for him to actually enter the lab, he sees that the kid is still out cold, lying on his chair in exactly the same position they left him in. Alphys is sitting next to him and reading to him from a book she brought. At least she's not openly crying anymore, but she does still seem upset. She's also an expert at ignoring her parents as they call for her to come and return home with them.

The mother actually turns to Gaster with a resigned sigh. "That thing," she starts hesitantly. "It's not a normal child, is it? It hasn't done anything this whole time, it's just lying there like a ‒ like a ‒"

"Puppet," the father jumps in. "It's unsettling, but ‒ it's better than what I assumed?"

Gaster crosses his arms and smiles at them slowly. "Well, it seems someone is actually a bit smarter than they look! Well done. Maybe, and here's a novel idea, maybe next time your daughter comes to you with a fantastical story about a child imprisoned by evil scientists, you should consider checking your facts first before running straight to the king of all monsters."

While the parents don't seem happy about the way he's talking to them ‒ and few people ever do, so that's not really a bother ‒ they do also have the decency to look a bit ashamed. The father is rubbing the back of his neck awkwardly. "I really thought my mother was experimenting on children," he says, shaking his head at his own stupidity. "We owe her one giant apology. Ah, and you too, of course, Dr. Gaster. We shouldn't have doubted you like that."

"Damn straight. But I'm feeling generous today, so you're forgiven. Concerning your daughter, if you would still want her to be involved in this experiment, which is not in any way harmful for her and actually very educational, we can talk about the details some time next week. You know, when things have calmed down a bit in here and we can be sure there are no more explosions. Well. Unscheduled ones."

After finally ushering the little family outside and receiving quite the stink eye from the little girl, Gaster hurries to check Sans' vitals. They're all stable, but he didn't expect the sedative to still be quite this potent after such a long time, so he gives him a breathing mask and puts the machines on alert if anything changes, just as a precaution.

He sinks into a chair next to him when he's done with that, taking just a short moment to concentrate on just breathing. His diaphragm still stings a bit and he rubs a hand over it, reaching into his pocket with the other and pulling out his pager again.

As he's clicking through the programs he installed on the thing, he at first doesn't notice the shuffling steps outside the door. When the doors slide open though, he quickly drops the little device back into his pocket and looks up with a not even entirely fake tired expression.

He raises his eyebrows in honest surprise. "Dr. Pollard," he greets the man standing in the doorway, holding onto the frame insecurely with one arm slung protectively over his own stomach. He seems queasy, but otherwise unharmed for the moment. "Not dead, I see. Nice of you to drop in, we have a lot of cleaning up to do in here." And he gestures at the broken glass covering the floor all over the lab.

Pollard stands still, thinking, and Gaster can't help but be intrigued. He leans his elbow on the armrest and watches him.

When he has enough of the silent staring contest, Pollard reaches into his pocket and pulls out his own pager, the one that Gaster saved the command line to that ended up saving the day. He turns it over in his hand nervously. "How did you know this?" he asks, holding up the beeper questioningly and swallowing thickly. "Th-there's ‒ there's no way you made that up on the spot, it's way too complicated. Not even you are that smart."

Gaster taps his fingers on his knee. "In my experience, that's just something stupid people say when they are confronted with actual genius. Keeps them from having to examine the illusions they built for themselves about their own intelligence."

Pollard stops turning the pager around, closes his fist around it and holds it up. He actually looks angry. "That's why you chose me, then," he says accusingly. "Because you think I'm the least intelligent. Because you thought I was the least likely to notice that something was off." He pushes himself off the frame, his clenched fists disappearing into his pockets, and he stares Gaster down. For five seconds.

Gaster has to fight hard to keep the grin off his face.

"What do you think, Dr. Gaster?" Pollard begins coldly. "How did a virus get into the CORE facility systems? The systems that are protected by codes you personally wrote? I wonder if taking a look at your pager would help solve that particular mystery."

It's a lost battle at this point. A wide, teeth baring grin stretches across Gaster's face. "Watch it, Dr. Pollard," he says lightly. "It seems you have a random backbone growing there." He can see the exact moment that his own grin grows diabolical; it's when Pollard has to visibly shake out his shoulders to get rid of the shudder creeping up his spine. "We wouldn't want you confused over what to do with that, would we?"

Still, Pollard straightens his shoulders immediately, his eyes sparking with hatred. "Don't worry, Sir," he says. "I won't be." And with that, he turns around and walks away.

Gaster blows a shrill whistle after him and breaks into a slow clap. "Holy shit, a one-liner! And he's walking off dramatically like a pro, too. I'm a proud papa right now." Somewhere down the corridor, he can hear Pollard slam a door.

Still chuckling quietly to himself, he drops his pager to the floor and encases it in a cloud of orange magic, ripping the still object to shreds until it's a puddle of molten plastic.