"Whoops. Guess we got a bit outta hand fighting that SOUL? Sorry, man."
"Oh, well. It's not a huge deal. I've till got the rest of the river to ride along."
The figure in the cloak looked back at the enormous pile of boulders blocking the way to Hotland and the capital, then shrugged, untying the rope holding their vessel to the river's pier. "Still…I'd like it very much if you could get it fixed soon. It'd get boring, seeing the same scenery again endlessly, right?"
"Tell that to everyone," Undyne muttered, gesturing at the cavern walls pressing down upon them all every hour of the day. "But for the river, I've got my people working on clearing it all out. Should be done by the end of the week."
Muttering its gratitude, the figure glided off towards Snowdin, leaving only the Royal Guard's Captain and a gargantuan pile of rocks blocking off the river behind.
She was about to start the long walk back to the ruins of her house to salvage anything else she could of her weapon collection from the wreck, but was distracted by a call coming on her phone. One glance at the caller ID told her everything she needed.
"Asgore!" she said, the instant the call picked up. "We've got the…thing…the second SOUL was after! Want me to drop it off at New Home or anything?"
"Er…May wanna make sure you got the right number, sport."
The voice that picked up wasn't Asgore's—at least, not completely. He sounded awfully like him, but his voice was distorted somewhat, and carried a musical, mellow twang her King's voice lacked.
It took her a second to remember who this voice belonged to—she'd rarely seen him speak, as he was usually silent and just standing by Asgore all the time.
"Oh, you're his personal bodyguard, right?" Undyne paused for a second, trying to remember if this monster was technically on her payroll or not. Then she remembered that, no, this guy had been around long before even her parents had been born.
"Yep, that's me." She heard the rattle of metal as the figure moved on the other end of the line—in the background, she could just barely make out Asgore humming as he watered the flowers in the Royal Garden. "Warden, too. 'S why I called, actually—We've heard you beat the SOULs, but you wouldn't happen to know where they are, do you?"
"Sorry, no clue," Undyne muttered, apologetically. "Papyrus said he never found where the first one landed, and the second was just yanked away after we—I beat it."
She heard a thoughtful hmmmm on the other end of the line, but the entity didn't press her further on her slip of the toungue.
"Well, not like it's a big deal now," he went on. "My [ability's] still workin', so the guy who sprung 'em can't absorb them unless he whacks Asgore."
"Which is not happening anytime soon," Undyne concluded, laughing. "No one can!"
"….Riiiight." The figure sounded unsure. Though, if anyone would know, it'd be Asgore's personal bodyguard, right? "Anyways, we ain't sure who this fella is. Under a foot tall, all plant-like, and eyes full o' hate—that's what the folks who saw him said. Sound familiar?"
She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration. JoJo had brought up this "Flowey" before, but hadn't elobrated on him much, seeming oddly angry when Papyrus had tried to brooch the subject after Sia's disappearance. "I think so. I'll keep my eye out."
"I think I can help you out, come to think of it." She heard the rattling of metal links being pulled taut for a few moments. Then, Asgore's bodyguard picked up the phone again.
"Two of 'em ain't moving anymore, but one of 'em…is near you. Keep an eye out, and see if you can bring it back this time—or at least find out what the heck that flower guy;s up to."
Surprisingly enough, the figure hung up there. Usually, Asgore would spend at least another minute talking, bringing up the nonexistent weather in the Underground, or at least text over a few funny pictures of fish that bore a passing resemblance to Undyne. Then again, it was just his bodyguard—it wasn't as if they were actually the same guy, she supposed.
Right?
"Udnyne!" a familiar, reedy voice called in the distance. "JoJo's messing with the wreckage of your house again!"
"Again?!" She turned and bolted off. She'd just found a human who wasn't utterly evil like she'd thought, and did not want him to end up stabbed to death oh her forks from his own stupidity!
And many miles away, the figure dropped the phone on the armrest of Asgore's throne.
"Just because he can't absorb them, doesn't mean we can't do anything," he said aloud, gliding to Asgore as he gingerly placed his watering can on the other armrest. "You could do more. You could fight."
Asgore looked at the room's other occupant. His ancient eyes were tinged with hundreds of years worth of regret, sorrow, and mistakes.
That look said more than any words ever could.
"I did," the King of Monsters said. "And I won't. I can't."
The figure sighed.
"Can't say I agree," he whispered, "but 's not like I can say no. Just keep an eye out, will 'ya?"
Asgore sat in his throne. The figure drifted closer, then sank into Asgore's body.
He reached under his throne, produced a thermos full of home-brewed tea, and took a deep sip. Then, with his free hand, he put his hand top his heart, pushed inside his chest, and withdrew a link of blue metal, pulsing with a faint light.
"It'll all work out in the end," he told himself. "There's no other way it can go. Ever."
Chapter 7
In Which Flowey asks Whose Line it Is, Anyways, Papyrus Solicits Door-to-Door NPCs Fruitlessly, and JoJo Gets High as a Kite.
"Now what is he doing?!"
"I'm…not sure!" Papyrus looked on with Undyne as Joesph rummaged around in the broken ruins of her house, even as the dust from their fight with Sia still settled. "He'd been doing that for around an hour...I've got it!" he said, snapping his fingers. "He must be building a puzzle!"
Ignoring Papyrus's rambling about puzzle construction and the importance of recycling, Undyne pushed her way past him and into the rubble of her home, getting a better look at what JoJo was up to.
"…might not work, since he can burrow through the ground," he muttered to himself, scratching out some lines he'd etched into the rock below with a sharp knife Undyne had in her collection. "So trying to set up some traps with Synchronicity's vines belowground won't work. But if I try something from the air, it'll have a better chance at working. Then again, if I can find some weedkiller at that junk store we were at earlier, and I just salt the ground with that, it could work."
He lifted his head from his work upon hearing Undyne's footsteps, and glanced up at her.
"You wouldn't happen to know if weedkiller works on plant monsters, do you?" he asked casually, even as he moved the scale model of a cartoonish bomb and some tiny weedwhackers made out of splinters. "Because, if it doesn't, I'll have to rework a good deal of my plans."
"Are you making some kind of plan of attack against this 'Flowey' guy?" Undyne knelt down, looking at the low-budget yet surprisingly complex model of Snowdin. "You do realize he's probably not going to be there?"
"Yeah, I figured as much." Even as he spoke, JoJo set down the last mini-bomb, cleared some more rubble with a casual "ARO" from his Stand, than laid out some vines in a crude representation of the river running through Snowdin, Sewer, and Waterfall. "Which is why I'm making more plans, in case we bump into the bastard anywhere else. You wouldn't happen to have a map of this town, would you? I didn't see much of it, since I spent my whole visit running for my life from Little Miss Psycho there."
Undyne tilted her head in confusion. Then, she took a seat on the wreckage of her dining room table, crossed her legs, and looked Joseph square in the eye.
"What's gotten into you?!" she demanded. "I almost kill you a couple of times, and you barely react. The SOUL back there almost disintegrates you and a couple of other innocent bystanders—you got angry, yeah, but…are you scared of this guy?"
JoJo dropped the vines he was clutching in his hand in surprise, and opened his mouth to speak. "I—"
He closed his mouth, and held his free hand to his chin, thinking how best to restart that sentence.
"I'm worried," he said, rephrasing his thoughts, presumably out of not wanting to admit he might be out of his league with this mysterious mastermind. "I only met this guy twice, and he nearly killed me both times. Which isn't anything special—I can name around a half-dozen times I've been in a fight for my life before ending up down here, and tons more since then. But he's tough."
"So? I'm tough, and you…beat me," Undyne replied, forcing those last few words out past her lingering shame and embarrassment over her past loss. "What's with all the diagrams? If you want to map out the Underground so badly, we've spent centuries down here! Just Google it!"
The human inhaled deeply, and sighed. He stayed quiet for a second.
"Whenever I get in a fight, I always win by outsmarting someone," he said at last. "If you can predict what your enemy does beforehand, then you can outwit him, and you've got victory in the bag. With you, with Sia, with Papryus, Toriel, and tons of other people, it's always been the same. Even in a fight, I figure what someone'll do next, and then I win."
"…So, if I'm getting this right," Undyne responded, "you've got a personal vendetta against this guy. Let me guess—"
"Don't bother." JoJo sighed, then looked down at the model of an unfamiliar set of ruins to the left of the outskirts of his Snowdin model. "What you're thinking now is right. And that's 'you got outwitted by Flowey, didn't you?'"
"You got outwitted by Flowey, didn't you?" Undyne blinked, and grumbled in irritation when she realized that JoJo had pulled that trick again on her. "Do you ever get that wrong?"
"What do you think? Just once. With him."
Synchronicity appeared, planted some throrns into the ground, and began slamming in splinter after splinter into them. When it was done, the thorns had become figures bearing the crude approximations of JoJo and Flowey, the latter matching the description Asgore's bodyguard had given to Undyne.
JoJo turned his hand over and pointed at the figures, and they began to move and speak.
Joseph staggered through the hallway, brushing the sweat from his brow.
"Sheesh, she was tougher than she looked."
As he walked onward, he promptly caught his foot on a vine, and fell flat on his face.
While his tumble didn't break anything, it was painful and humiliating. He got up, and kicked at the purple vine with his foot. The same thing had shown up during his fight with Toriel, but it didn't look much like that damn flower that he'd seen within minutes of ending up in this hellhole. What was going on?
He continued forward, but he scarcely got a few paces away from where he'd fallen down (again) before he heard a sickeningly-familiar laugh.
"Clever."
He immediately knew who this was. He stepped forward, and instantly saw it looming before him.
Well, looming was a poor choice of words, given how this guy barely reached up to Joseph's knees at his full height. Nevertheless, the flower gave off an air of unmistakable menace, and the mocking laughter was not making it any less annoying.
"Verrrryyy clever," he went on, a psychotic smirk glued to his face as he spoke. "You think you're really smart, don't you?"
"Big difference between thinking and knowing, pipsqueak," Joseph snarked. " 'Kill or be killed,' you said? Guess what: you're wrong. I went through all that, all those monsters and fights? And who died? No. One."
Flowey chuckled. "You were able to play by your own rules this time. You didn't kill a single person. Hee hee hee…I bet you feel really great."
"Damn right, I do," JoJo laughed. "And how do you feel? You seemed pretty sure of yourself knowing how this world worked. Guess you're not as all-knowing as you thought, huh?"
"So you spared one person. Sue me." Undeterred, Flowey inched closer to JoJo, eventually standing only a few inches from his face. "But what happens if you meet a remorseless, relentless killer? One you can't outsmart, or a fight you can't trick your way out of?"
"Lot of 'ifs' there, buddy. Then…I'll probably just beat them until they can't move." Joseph leaned in close to Flowey, his face eventually resting mere inches from the abomination's head. "But I won't kill them. At that last second, the inch from death, I think I'll let them live. Not because I don't want to kill them—I don't, but that's not the point.
"The reason I'll keep this streak going…is to mock you. If you're going to keep watching me, then I'll keep going how I'm going, just so I can rub it in your face how you're wrong, over and over, you sadistic little—"
"You're also using a lot of "ifs' there too, aren't you?" Flowey mockingly asked, turning his back to JoJo and scuttling back across the ground to a more comfortable patch of dirt to rest on. "Then here's another…What if you're in a situation where you can't win by your rules? Or at all? Will you give up, and let me take the power and [take the throne] to control this world?"
"You really think you can see that far into the future, huh?" Joseph stepped forward, gradually coming closer to Flowey again. He put his hand up to his neck, straining his palm to crack his joints and work out some stress induced from his climactic fight with Toriel. "Well, I can do the same. In fact, I know that your very next line is 'There's no way you can take the [king of the world] by surprise!"
Smirking, Joseph brought his hand down to his scarf, withdrew a dull knife that he'd "borrowed" from Toriel's kitchen, and hurled it right at Flowey's face. He knew he would easily dodge the strike, but the second he'd turn around to dodge and keep monologuing,
Joseph would be ready with a fist to his smug face!
"Hee hee. You really are an idiot."
Flowey did turn around, but he just stood there. He simply sat there and allowed the knife to come closer. And closer it came, even when it soared into his face and through his entire head, splitting the entire upper half of his body in half.
JoJo's eyes widened in confusion. Then, they further widened in pain, as he looked down to see the sizable, sharpened vine now jutting out from his torso.
"Did you really think I'd be so predictable?" Flowey asked from behind him, slinking between his legs to stare down the injured human face to face.
"H…how did…You do that? No one's…beaten my—"
His question was interrupted by a gasp of pain as Flowey slowly withdrew his tendril, painfully sliding past his ribs and puncture wound and returning to its normal size.
"Wow, talk about arrogant!" Flowey hopped through the air, and landed on his own corpse with a nauseating squish. "You're not the only one who knows how to pull that trick! I've had plenty of opportunities to learn how!"
JoJo fell to one leg, holding his wound with one hand and gripping the other across his knee. Miraculously, Flowey had somehow missed all the vital organs, but he had to bandage that wound now, or—
"I mean, did you really think you could take me out with a knife? Me?! In the opening act of this tale?" Giggling, Flowey lashed out with tentacles, and wrapped himself around the bleeding, split open halves of his other body.
"Well, you did!" Flowey lauded again, as he impaled his own body with the same tendril he had used to strike JoJo. "But it just didn't stick! Try as hard as you might, but killing me is [useless!] And continued to stab his own corpse, again and again. Sap, far more sap than there should have been in his tiny body, gushed from his lifeless form and pooled all over the floor
"Idiot, idiot, IDIOT!" Roaring with laughter, Flowey hoisted what was left of his body high into the air, and pulled. It ripped open, showering him with his own gore.
"Oh…my…God!…you're even crazier than I…thought." In spite of the nigh-debilitating pain in his chest, Joseph managed to get off his knees and into a crouching stance, though another spazm of sharp pain prevented him from rising to his full, towering height.
"Crazy, am I?" Flowey tilted his head in an imitation of confusion and curiosity, but his sadistic smirk returned mere moments later. "That's all relative, right? It all depends on who's talking. And I am the prince of this world's future. Royalty is destined to lead you peasants, and there's nothing you can do to change that."
The human's muscles twitched, and his eyes narrowed in rage. "Peasant? Who the hell even are you to go on like this? Who talks like that?!"
"Hee…you really want to know?" Flowey turned around, looking up at the Underground's ceiling dramatically. "I already told you, you idiot! I'm Flowey! Flowey the Flower! But you mean specifics, right? Too bad! Not giving any of my surprises away!
"Though you even being here's made things preeeety interesting for me as me," he noted.
Movement, in the corner of his eye. Joseph looked down, and saw something in Flowey's shadow. Rather than light reflecting his sillohete, it instead took the form of an exact copy of him. Every last detail, from the petal placement to the coloring, was refacted upon where his shadow should be. Save for the skull for a face, and its glowing white eyes.
"I honestly expected you to use it by now," he went on, his sort-of shadow mimicking his swaying from side to side as he spoke. "I guess you can't! So, secret—I'm a time traveller!"
Joseph tore his eyes away from Flowey's shadow to look at the puddles of blood littering the floor.
An idea struck.
"[Megadeth]…the power to SAVE and LOAD across time, shaping the timestream like a god…to turn back the clock, wipe the slate clean, make the world your personal sandbox game! But I can't seem to do that anymore! I wonder why…"
Laughter echoed throughout the room again. However, this time, it wasn't Flowey.
"And what do you think is so funny?" Smirking, Flowey swiveled in place to look at JoJo. "You're bleeding through an open wound. Even if you eat the pie the old hag gave you and heal up, you're done."
"And next…is 'it's impossible for you to beat me! Now or ever!' "
"I win. I always win. Now and ever."
Flowey abruptly stopped swaying, and Joseph took his chance the moment he saw it! Whipping his arm back, he prepared to throw the sharp, heavy rock he had scooped up from the ground when he was forced into a kneeling position earlier. Going fast enough, at a target standing still, he had no way of missing!
Or so one would think, but the moment his arm passed his head, the pain from his injury spiked up again, and the jolt of his wounds caused him to flinch in the throw. No matter what he did, it was too late for the stone to directly hit its mark.
"Really?" Flowey burst into laughter. "You really think one lucky guess is going to—"
He was unable to continue that sentence. Having one's face ripped open like shredded paper by a fast-moving rock would do that to anyone.
Even as his corpse hit the floor, the not-shadow underneath him rose out of the ground, as normally as one would walk into a room. The new Flowey lurched back into life, and glared at JoJo.
"Looks like that ego got the better of you," Joseph said. Now it was his turn to have the mocking smile the two were apparently sharing between one another, and Flowey's face was set into one of deep annoyance. "Or, would it be you messing with your corpses that did you in?"
Flowey looked down, and instantly figured out what he had done. The ripples in one particular pool of blood close to him made that very clear. He had never intended to make a straight throw—he must have faked the muscle tremors from before, and skipped the stone across the blood to kill him!
"You still wanna say you're an invincible god or whatever?" As Flowey was glaring at him, he quickly grabbed the slice of buttersctotch cinnamon pie Toriel had given him, and crammed it into his mouth. Joseph sighed in relief as the gaping wound in his chest vanished, leaving only ripped clothing as the proof it was ever there. "Gods don't get punked like that so easy, even if your line and mine had different wordings!"
"Well. Well well well."
Much to JoJo's mounting frustration, Flowey didn't break into any temper tauntrums or fits of rage over getting tricked after all his boasts. He just laughed again.
"I underestimated you!" he said, his voice as inappropriately chipper as ever. "You're not as idiotic as you look! Though, to tell you the truth, I never planned to kill you in the first place?"
"…Then what the fuck was all of that just now?"
"Oh? Just putting the peasants in their place." Flowey (and his not-shadow, which had just re-emerged from nowhere)'s face twisted at unnatural angles, as if he had suddenly grown a skull which had swapped places with the outside of his face. "You, against the plans I've had going for thousands of years…this is much more exciting than killing you!"
With those last words, Flowey vanished into the dirt and soil, leaving behind only a simple arch leading deeper into the Underground, and a bemused and irritated JoJo to walk through it.
JoJo pulled backwards with his hand, and the tiny vine attached to the remaining makeshift puppet snapped. It broke apart, falling back into the same pile of tinder and rubble that it was created from.
"Sounds like you got your ass handed to you," Undyne said. She was unable to keep a mean-spirited smile off of her face.
Contrary to what she expected, JoJo nodded. "I did. I'm still not totally sure why he didn't just kill me there, but my guess is that he wanted to toy with me. If he was really as old as he says (which I doubt, by the way), then he probably just wanted to see what I could do, since I did manage to hit him."
"You sure about that?" Undyne prodded the spot where the disassembled Flowey puppets were with her foot. "He let out the human SOULs we had. He sent one of them after the [Dagger] in that vault back there. There's no way someone like him would screw around and let a living human run free!"
"Well, you have a point…for once," JoJo agreed. As Undyne rolled her eye (having resigned herself to the fact that not all friendships could be as perpetually doting and even-tempered as she once thought), he continued.
"Normally, I'd never want to do this," Joseph said, "but I'm itching to find out what that little weed's up to. There's no way I'll let him walk all over me and lord his power all over me…us!"
Undyne's pocket began to spontaneously vibrate, drawing both of their attentions away from the conversation for the moment. She retrieved her phone, and checked the front screen.
"Another one?! So soon?!"
"I'm going to take a wild guess here and say you mean 'another one of the SOULs Flowey's got under his thumb,' right?"
"No, it's a wedding invitation, and my lieutenant just asked me to preside over their third marriage. Of course it's a SOUL, you punk!"
"Hey, hey, take it easy," JoJo said, laughing and jokingly holding his hands up in the air as Undyne's now-familiar headache returned. "So, where is it this time?"
In response, Undyne grabbed her phone again, re-opened the message, and tapped on the small display of a map in the corner of the notification.
"Clifftown," she said, as a map of the village loaded onto her phone's screen. Judging by the automatic suggestion for a GPS-optimized path to it, the place was roughly an hour's walk from Sewer, or about 90 minutes from where they were now in Waterfall. "It's another one of those new towns, after Asgore started all those big urbanization projects to help curb overcrowding."
"Like Sewer," Joseph remarked. "Is there even enough room for cliffs?"
Undyne stood up, and started walking away from her destroyed home, gesturing for JoJo to follow. Grudgingly, he did so.
"A couple decades back, we started carving out the inside of the mountain we were stuck under—Ebott, right? We were having trouble digging deeper down, since we hit bedrock around the time the queen vanished. So, we figured, why not start going up, and making more room that way? Plus it gets us closer to the sky, which is what all of us want!"
"Not a bad idea," JoJo remarked, as the two walked down the road. "But wouldn't there be a ton of rubble from all that? How did everyone below avoid getting crushed?"
"Asgore handled that," answered Undyne. "It was when I was still a kid, so I don't know much of the details, but he and his bodyguard used some kind of spell which made a giant metal net, which caught all that before it fell."
"His…bodyguard?" Joseph asked. "Isn't that your job?"
Undyne snorted in laughter, as they neared the edge of the tiny neighbourhood where Undyne (used to) live. Papyrus was gone—according to a text he'd sent in the middle of JoJo's story, he had went to grab everyone lunch.
"No, I protect everyone else!" As they kept walking, Undyne summoned The Messenger, casually having the Stand grab and punt a large stone from the nearby river into the mouth of one of the many tunnels Sia had made in their earlier chase. "He doesn't show up much, and it's usually for ceremonies and all that formal junk. He's got a really weird accent, and he's always wearing a big white suit and a stupid haircut, so he's probably from before the war."
"Hang on a second. He only shows up alongside Asgore…he does magic stuff with him…and he looks different from most contemporary monsters."
"…yeah, that's basically what I said. What are you saying?"
"Is his bodyguard a [Stand?]"
Undyne's steps slowed as they passed by Gerson's shop, as what JoJo was implying sunk in. "A Stand?" she repeated. "But aren't those supposed to be super rare for monsters?...Well, if anyone besides me and maybe Gerson could use 'em, it'd definitely be him!"
"But you said he's from before the war…which can't be right. Sans mention that he'd helped out with research on them, and they don't look like normal humans or monsters at all." To demonstrate, he briefly caused Synchronicity to manifest by overlaying it across his body. Indeed, the golden titan only barely looked humanoid, the twisting and moving purple vines stretched all across and woven into its form made it look more like a hedge sculpture than a living person.
"So, Stands—at least for you monsters—were found a few decades ago, which is why Asgore's bodyguard looks unusual for the time. And Sans has one because he was on that project, so he was probably exposed to whatever activated Asgore's…"
Undyne tilted her head on confusion as they passed by Sans's sentry spot. Sans himself was lying down…on thin air, roughly twenty feet above the stall. JoJo saw him, looked again in a quick double-take, then shrugged, deciding that it'd be pointless to bother considering physical impossibilities with monsters and Stands.
"Do you have a point with any of this?" she asked, as they neared the sewer grate to Sewer where Papyrus said he would meet her.
"Where did all the other Stands come from?" Joseph finally asked, putting his hand to his chin in thought. "Toriel's, Papyrus's, Flowey's, mine…it feels like something has to be connecting all this. And it's right on the tip of my tongue! Argh, I hate it when my mind gets like this! Tell me, damnit!"
"Sorry I kept you waiting!"
Bursting right into JoJo's thoughts, Papyrus also straight out of Sewer through the grate, Thriller trailing behind him with takeout containers in its hands.
"I, the Great Papyrus, had trouble deciding which food would be best for my friends!" He posed dramatically, Thriller holding their lunches out to them past Papyrus's sides. "Sadly, I didn't have time to cook, since Matthew severed the wires to our gas line in our scuffle the other day, and most restaurants had too long a wait time! I left lines four times because it was just taking too long!
"But I eventually got some pasta for you. It's not spaghetti," he admitted sheepishly, "but fettuccine is an acceptably-close relative for an informal brunch like this!"
"Sorry, we don't have time for brunch," Undyne told him, already having taken her food from Thriller and walking onwards. "Another SOUL showed up, and we have to take care of it before it can cause any more damage!"
"But…we can't just eat on the road!" Papyrus objected, running after her. "Your intestines will get upset! Or…would that be your stomachs? I'm still not clear how organs work!"
"...Which is why Sans and I moved to Snowdin! Because our old one shook itself apart when I had the band rehearse at home!"
"That's why you ended up moving?!" Undyne asked, in between fits of gut-bursting laughter. "Holy crap, I thought you guys moved to avoid the overcrowding or something! What did you even play?"
"I…don't remember the exact tune," Papyrus remarked, as they continued walking on the steep path to Clifftown, "but it wasn't our fault! The speakers did it! Luckly, the lawsuit someone else ran against Metatton won, so we got reimbursed for most of our belongings."
"See, that's why you shop at the local stores! Or make everything yourself!" Undyne proudly pointed at herself, then slumped her shoulders in disappointment when she realized that she wasn't wearing her armor anymore, since JoJo had broken it into thousands of pieces the other day.
"All that mass-produced crap breaks in a single hit!" she continued, calling out her spear from nowhere instead to continue showing off. "It's all about quality over quantity, Papyrus!"
"Well, at least it's cheap," JoJo piped in. "Good for saving money. Guess that goes true for here and up there."
Undyne checked the directions on her phone, then led the group right at the next fork in the road, the left leading to a breathtaking lookout point over the entire Underground that they had no time to stop at. "Okay, we've got a few minutes before we get there, so…JoJo! You next!"
"Well…what do you want to know?" Stretching out his fingers, Joseph began counting down how many interesting life stories came to mind, but gave up when he realized he had too many. Was that a good or bad thing? "I've got a lot, so be specific."
"Let's start with your family life!"
JoJo's smile abruptly disappeared. "…Huh?"
"You heard me! Where'd you grow up! What kind of place did you have on the surface? A big house? A gated community? A mansion? The way you act, it's gotta be—"
"Sorry, that one's not really interesting." Shrugging, Joseph turned away and looked further up the road. "An apartment, Granny Lucy and me, a big city near the ocean called New York…nothing special. And nothing worth sharing."
He was clearly lying, but Papyrus understood that this might not be a topic he wanted to talk about. Time to save his friend from peril!
"If you say so, then I have a far better story for you! Undyne! Why don't you tell him about how you lost your eye!"
"Eh?" Undyne glanced at Papyrus. Then, she grinned.
"Alright! That story's always a hit!" She cleared her throat, flipper her eyepatch up for dramatic effect, and began.
"It was the first fight I was ever in!" she started, the air around her starting to grow cold and oppressing. JoJo couldn't tell if that was from them just getting higher up, or her Stand doing it for dramatic effect.
"I was walking home from school one day, and I heard a scream! I ran into a nearby alley, and I saw a mugger, holding someone up for their wallet! He had a knife on him! Two of them! And his entire body was covered in really sharp spikes! Now, I didn't lose my eye from any of those, but—"
Papyrus tilted his head in confusion. "Wait a second! Where did all that come from? You said last time that you poked it out by accident while you were running around, showing everyone your first ever magic spear? Where did all this come from?"
Undyne abruptly stopped talking. The Messenger sprung out of her back, and smacked Papyrus hard on the back of his skull with the shaft of its spear.
"So, as I was saying…" Undyne said, "I fought that mugger, and handed his butt to him in a fight! But then his cronies came out of the shadows, and I had to beat them too! And from all that, I decided to train to become part of—"
"You may want to save the rest of that for later," Joseph interrupted, cutting in and thrusting his arm out to stop the rest of the party in their tracks. "We're here."
They had indeed arrived at Clifftown, but it looked absolutely nothing like what Undyne had heard of the place. Granted, it was hard to tell what it looked like: the entire city was pitch black, and all of the lights were off. JoJo could make out the faint outlines of blocky buildings and the occasional sculpture or bench along the street, but everything else was too dark to see.
"The hell?" Undyne asked, as they walked into town. Even though their eyes would adjust to the darkness in a few minutes, this would make the entire town a pain to navigate. "Either there's a power outage, or all the lightbulbs in the city just burnt out!"
Joseph and Papyrus took out their phones, tapping the on buttons and holding them up in front of them. The pale light of a home screen lit the street in front of them, becoming slightly brighter when Papyrus hit the flashlight button on his settings screen. Joseph fumbled around on his own phone for a few seconds, but found no such setting—the old flip phone Toriel had fished out of the trash back in the Ruins must have been too old of a model to have it.
"So, who was it that told you that the SOUL was here?" he asked, as they crossed into town and narrowly avoided tripping on the sidewalk's steep curb.
"Some Royal Guard members live here, and they sent me a text about it!" She pulled up a corresponding message, and read it aloud.
" 'Yo, Captain Dude! 02 and I saw something really weird on the way back from our patrol!' " she repeated. " 'It looked kinda like that picture of a human the King used on TV. But it was, like, green? And the dude had this weird, big pen he was scribbling graffiti with on our house! Anyways, he ran away before 02 and I could fight him, but you asked us to tell you if we, like, saw one. So…we saw one! See you, dude! 01, XO.' "
"Giant pen…" JoJo mused. "Could it be his Stand? The first two also had Stands, so it would make sense if all of them had them."
"Doesn't matter!" said Undyne. "Stand, legendary stationary, giant novelty pen from a gift shop or something…the SOUL's the one who is dangerous!"
"Yeah, I guess," JoJo agreed, frowning as he saw that it was still rather dark deeper into town—their eyes hadn't fully adjusted to the darkness yet. "I mean, a Stand and its User are linked—we all know that. So they're technically the same thing. But do we even know if it's still here?"
"Why don't we ask?" Papyrus suggested.
Breaking off from the group, Papyrus marched across the street and approached a middle-aged monster standing at the nearby crosswalk, staring blankly into the distance.
"Hello, sir!" Papyrus said, getting uncomfortably close to the monster, his skull inches away from both of the man's heads.
"Hi!," the stranger responded, looking at him with a blank, expressionless face. "Welcome to Clifftown!"
"Thank you very much! Anyways, I, the Great Papyrus, am looking for someone with my friends? Have you seen a human SOUL around town lately?"
The stranger looked at him, unblinking and standing ramrod still.
"Hi!" he simply repeated. "Welcome to Clifftown!"
"Yes, this town!" Papyrus confirmed, not catching on to anything odd in the slightest. "Have you or anyone else seen a SOUL around here?"
"Hi! Welcome to Clifftown!"
Undyne growled, and stormed over to the other monster. "Okay, very funny. I'm sure the tourism board is paying you to say that to attract tourists or settlers to this top of the end, booming beacon of industry or whatever! But we need to find a SOUL! Do you know anything?!"
"Hi! Welcome to Clifftown!"
"…Forget it," Undyne muttered, tugging Papyrus away from the dazed and repetitive man and back across the street. "He's probably spent too much time spamming stuff on the Internet! Or he's drunk or something!"
"I didn't think I smelled any alcohol."
"You don't have a nose!"
"Neither do you!" Papyrus helpfully pointed out, poking Undyne on the blank spot of her face where a nose would be on most people.
Joseph ignored both of them arguing over…that…and looked around the rest of the city. It seemed that his eyes had finally adjusted, and he at least saw enough of the city that he didn't risk bumping into anything if he just wandered around aimlessly. He saw some more people scattered around town: all with similar expressions, standing perfectly still, and staring into the distance, just the same as the man Undyne and Papyrus had just spoken to.
"What's up with everyone in this town?" he asked himself.
"I run the inn!"
"OH MY GOD!" JoJo screamed, jumping several inches in surprise.
He whipped around in place, sighing when he saw that it was just a dragoness in a work apron standing behind him.
"Holy shit, warn someone when you're shilling your hotel!" he shouted, glaring angrily at her.
"I run the inn!" was her only reply.
"Yeah, I get that. So, is there a reason everyone's just standing around? Did someone put LSD in the water supply, or what?"
"I run—"
"The inn," Joseph finished, already walking away from her. "Thanks, huge help, ma'am!"
Undyne glared at the muscular equine-esque monster lying in her path.
He didn't look up. He looked down, grunting in exertion as his muscles rippled from the strain this long, long exercise stance was putting on him. Grunting, he shifted his weight, re-adjusting to lie on his forearms more comfortably, and bent down his back to stretch even further.
"Could you do that at home?!" she demanded, prodding at him with the butt of her spear.
"Mhhhh, the burn…it feels so good. ;)"
"Damnit, Aaron!"
Bad enough that he was the fifth monster to serve as some weird impromptu road block in as many minutes to the group. But it just had to be him! Now that she knew this creep lived in Clifftown, she wouldn't be visiting here for a long time.
The fact that he was planking directly in front of a narrow passage—the only exit out of town aside from where Undyne and everyone else had come from, was the cherry on top of the sundae of crap here. The leader of the Royal Guard sighed when she noticed tgat the passage was not natural, and was in fact a huge amount of rocks that had recently fallen into a tunnel-like structure. Even without killing anyone, Sia was still being a bitch!
"Mhhhh, the burn…it feels so good. ;)" he repeated, winking at Undyne.
"Can't we just walk over him and break the rocks?" JoJo asked, moving forward to look at the rubble in front of them. "It'd be really easy to just keep going."
Undyne shook her head. "This is the edge of town, and the SOUL's got to be here. We're not leaving until we find it."
"At least it looks like there won't be any more landslides from whatever you did earlier today!" Papyrus chirped. Indeed, the near-constant, automatic notifications of cave-ins constantly interrupting the Mettaton podcast he was listening to had finally ceased. He popped his earbuds back in.
They promptly fell out of his skull and dropped all across the floor—once again, his lack of ears betrayed him!
Losing her temper, Undyne kicked Aaron hard in the stomach. There was a loud thud as well-toned muscle met well-toned muscle, and JoJo could have sworn he saw sparks fly on the impact. Sadly, the planking monster did not budge, or even react to the attack in any way, shape, or form. He just…kept still.
"I'm getting pretty pissed here," Undyne said, stepping backwards and clenching her fists hard. "No one's answering any questions here! Not a single person!"
As Aaron re-adjusted himself yet again, Joseph noticed a flash of purple from behind him—was something etched onto the tunnel walls?
"It's freaky, yeah, but what about the guys who tipped you off?" he asked, as he fell to his knees to get a better look. Grimacing in disgust, he put his face low to the ground, and looked under the oblivious monster.
From what little he could see between Aaron's washboard abs and constantly dripping sweat, JoJo was able to make out something resembling a gang sign tag. Having spent his entire childhood and adolescence in the city, he'd seen more than his fair share of these in the day. But this one was tough to make out—grey dust, presumably from the landslide which made the tunnel, was obscuring most of it, and he was not touching Aaron if he didn't have to. Not like it was a big deal, really.
"You mean…01 and 02, right?" Undyne paused in the middle of her answer to yank Papyrus's headphones out of his grasp, growling something to him about staying focused on important things over stupid celebrity gossip. "Their patrol route ended around an hour ago, so they should be coming home."
"Pretty much all the houses are blocked off, though. I mean, assuming all those clearly brainwashed monsters are standing in the same places we saw them in ten minutes ago." He squinted as he spoke. It was no use—no matter which angle he looked at, the graffiti was too obscured and blocked off to fully read. All he could make out was the artist's signature—a tiny "J.S."
"They're brainwashed?!" Undyne repeated, casually holding the earbuds above her head with one hand and pushing her other hand against Papyrus, foiling his valiant struggle to get his stuff back. "I mean…they can't be brainwashed! Even brainwashed people get more than one line to parrot over and over! Doesn't it just flip a switch from good to bad or something? These people…they just have one thing to do, and don't stop!"
Finally giving up on getting his headphones back, Papyrus resolved himself to pay attention to the dark, boring, and very uncool town they had found themselves in. "Er…life isn't one of your animes, Undyne!" Papyrus said, speaking up with a hint of annoyance in his voice at being interrupted at the best part of the podcast. "Didn't you say the same thing about humans being able to mind-control people? Like that one 'historical robot dramatization' you saw with Alphys?"
She blanched at being reminded about that, and surreptitiously glanced back at JoJo.
"That…uh…come on, he's way too much of a showoff to do that!" she stammered, after taking a few seconds to scramble through her thoughts for an justification against that.
"Yeah, yeah, touché," Joseph admitted as he got to his feet and pivoted where he stood to look at the non-crazy (well, non brainwashed crazy) monsters here. "It's way funnier when they do themselves in. Like you did!"
"Hey, I had you on the ropes!" she objected, gesturing wildly in an attempt to reenact her earlier duel with just her fingers. Unsurprisingly, she was not successful. "You just copped out of the fight by using all that steam on me!"
Luckily, before they could get into another long-winded and repetitive argument about who beat who again, they were mercifully cut off by the loud, ominous sounds of growling.
"…Speaking of being on the ropes, all of the weird junk in this town's made me hungry!" Undyne declared, rubbing at her roaring and empty stomach. "You said that one lady is still running the inn?"
Joseph glanced at the aforementioned tavern, now lit by the soft, comforting glow of candlelight due to the power outage. "Yeah, and that's all she does, apparently. I'm kind of hoping it's just mind control, because otherwise…"
He didn't need to finish that sentence—he knew his point was already made to anyone with a brain.
"Alright then!" Papyrus cut in, clearly missing what had just sunk in with Undyne. The skeleton, already walking off in the direction of the inn, pulled out his wallet from inside his organ-less, hollow pelvic bones and began rifling through his gold on hand. "I'll pay!"
"Hey! Money's on me!" Undyne barked, breaking into a run after him. "I'm technically on the job, so this shit is deductible!"
Papyrus's omnipresent and, to be honest, charming naiveté had lifted the mood somewhat—for the moment, JoJo left the thought of an everlasting town of dead-eyed zombies behind and followed them.
All that was left behind was a planking horseman, a ton of rubble, and empty, dark houses. For a second, the lights behind Joseph flicked on, revealing almost every surface—every square inch—inside to be covered in dark purple, still-wet graffiti paint. The lights flicked off again, plunging the town into candlelight and cellphone glare once more.
"So, I'll take the burger…whatever version of beef you guys make out of magic's fine, some fries, and a soda.."
"I run the inn!" the innkeeper echoed, robotically turning in the other direction and walking back towards the other end of the inn's dining area.
"At least whatever's messing with everyone lets them do more than stand in place," JoJo added, kicking his legs up onto the table and resting his chin on his fist.
"Were you raised in a barn?!" Papyrus huffed, smacking Joseph's leg to the ground with Thriller's gloved hand. "That lady back there's busy enough doing that one thing to worry about someone getting dirt all over the tablecloth!" The silverware neatly laid out across the table clattered to the ground from the impact. JoJo made no move to pick them back up, so Papyrus huffed in indignation and ducked underneath to grab them.
"Not like she'd notice, anyways," Undyne countered, glancing around the inn and shuddering. Even when the perpetual gloom of the town had been brightened now that she could see more than five inches in front of her face, the whole thing was eerie. It set all of her nerves on edge—like any second, they would fall into some kind of nightmare dimension they would have to face their inner demons to escape!
"Oh! That reminds me!" Papyrus said, jumping through the table and to his feet. "I think I left my newest dish in the storage boxes! It should be done aging, so I'll go get it as an appetizer!"
He bolted off towards the edge of town, leaving JoJo and Undyne (both too used to the skeleton by now to be surprised by his antics any longer) sitting at the ruins of the table.
"You almost got splinters in my good eye, Papyrus!" Undyne snapped after him, shrugging the tablecloth covering her to the ground, and brushing the rest of the splintered wood off of herself. "Aim the other way next time!"
By the time she finished her sentence, Papyrus was naturally long gone—obviously the training he had been doing with her had paid off, since he'd broken his record in 10 meter sprints! And now 100 meters…and 200 meters…
"That was…kind of sudden," JoJo remarked, as he got up and walked over to the adjacent, intact table and sat down with his legs up again. "If it's aging, how important could ten more minutes of waiting be?"
"You know Papyrus, right?" Undyne joined him at the next table, and looked out the dark window at Papyrus's rapidly fading form. "He's…Papyrus."
JoJo chuckled at her apt description of the other monster, and grabbed the glass from the innkeeper's hands as she brought them their drinks. Naturally, she showed no reaction to her customer taking the drink from her rather than letting her put it on his side of the table. That enchantment was really strong if no one reacted to stuff like that, Joseph noted.
As he sipped his drink, the sound of loud marching in plated boots echoed in his ears.
"Hey, is that…" Undyne stopped mid-sentence to look out the window, leaning out of her chair and almost falling out of it in the process.
"It is!" she confirmed, flipping out of the furniture and striding over to the window for a closer look. "01 and 02! Finally, someone here who isn't clueless or washed out of their minds!"
" 'Washed out of their minds'?" JoJo repeated. "I don't think that's how brainwashing works. But what do I know—you're the wizard here, right?"
Undyne ignored him, and moved closer to the front door.
"Hey, guys!" she yelled, as she flung it open and poked her head out the entrance. "Before you turn in for the day, I'm going to need a report! What the hell's going on here!"
Turning at a mathematically-perfect right degree angle, the duo of guards walked towards Undyne…and through the wall of the inn, missing the door by at least a few feet.
"So, what's up here?" she asked, clearly not caring about property damage in the face of needing justice done. "Your route ended, so…oh come on, not you too!"
Both of her subordinated showed no sign that they had heard her, and kept on marching through the hotel.
"I run the inn!" the innkeeper parroted to them, as she walked past the still-patrolling guards with the trio's food in her hands.
"We're on patrol, dude!" the one with rabbit-like ears sticking out of his helmet said, his words echoing robotically out of his metal helmet. "Like, no lollygagging!"
"…Clear up, get out of our way," his compatriot muttered.
Their captain hissed in frustration, and darted after them. "Hey, you missed me! I'm right here! You can just report right now, forget about the paperwork back home!"
As the two echoed the same lines to her, and as she ran through their path of destruction through the kitchen, Joseph shrugged, and took a bite of his burger.
"At least she can still cook well," he mused, taking another bite and washing it down with the last of his drink.
He shifted his legs to get his feet higher up on the table, and he stopped chewing as he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
In the corner of the nearest hallway, a door to a single chamber was open—the first room for guests in the inn, probably? Or maybe the innkeeper's office?
Whatever it was, the door was slightly ajar, and the lights were on. Even with the power outage the town was experiencing at the moment. Did she have a generator for this place?
Swallowing the last bite of his burger, JoJo climbed out of his chair and crept towards the door.
"Well, well, what do we have here?" he asked himself, grabbing the door's handle and preparing to wrench it the rest of the way open. "A bedroom? A stalker shrine to that robot on TV? Or…something else?!"
Preparing himself for all manner of embarrassing or perverted things he expected to find behind that door, he yanked it open.
Instead, his eyes were met with a mess. And then, his pupils dilated in horror, as he realized exactly what he was looking at.
Several piles of dust littered the floor, sparking a sharp contrast to the rest of the tidy office the room contained. And the clothes mixed in with the dust made it very clear what he had just walked in on.
A monster murder scene.
He looked down, and the murder weapon fell into his gaze—a knife, covered with chalk-white powder.
What the hell had happened here? He had to know.
Almost without thinking about it, he bent down and picked up the knife. Swallowing his bile, he carefully brushed the dust off of the blade.
Other than the fact that it was just used to kill someone, it looked like an ordinary steak knife, probably stolen from the kitchen by the killer.
…Wait. Wasn't this the part where he put it down?
He held the knife over the desk, and tried to let go. No dice—his fingers refused to move.
"The fuck?" he asked, trying to pry his stuck fingers loose with his free hand. He even called up Synchronicity's arms to get an extra pair of hands to free his bound fingers.
But no matter how hard he or his Stand tried, he couldn't let go.
He quickly ran through ways he could destroy the knife itself by synchronizing it to something fragile, but as he scanned if over for ideas, his gaze fell upon the hilt, and it was suddenly quite clear why he couldn't let go.
Etched onto the handle, written in thin, purple ink, were the words "HOLD ME."
And, no matter how hard he struggled, he couldn't let go. There was nothing wrong with his muscles, and it wasn't like anything was physically forcing him to grab on. The thought of letting go that his brain was desperately transmitting to his stuck hand just wasn't getting through—like someone had blocked off the nerves in his fingers from the neurotransmitters of his body.
What made things exponentially worse were the sounds of Undyne's footsteps, walking back this direction and towards the room. And towards JoJo, stuck holding the murder weapon which had been used too recently to kill about a dozen people.
He instantly realized what the culprit of this crime spree had been planning. Immediately, several points ran through JoJo's brain, all clamoring to be the first to get through the door and into the forefront of his mind.
First, that he had stumbled into a classic trap of being framed for murder. The enemy had used their [Stand] ability—what else could it be?—to force him to pick up and keep hold of the knife to implicate him for the killings. Worse, lack of any fingerprint evidence or anything else that could exonerate him…no, due process was not important! Hadn't helped him before, won't help him now.
Second, Undyne was mere steps away. He could already hear her grumbling about annoying subordinates and making them do hundreds of push ups in a single go as punishment for falling for mind control so easily. She'd see the room in seconds, and she was exactly the wrong person to stumble across him caught in this trap.
After all, Undyne was impulsive and hot-headed…like him. But unlike him, she was the type to shoot first and ask questions never—after an exhausting day spent building some modicum of trust and friendship between them, forged by the fires of battle, it would snap in half if she took this all at face value. And she would.
Which would put them right back where they were yesterday. A deadly enemy, out for his blood. Maybe more so than last time.
And that brought JoJo to his third and most pressing concern—foiling the trap. He had nowhere to hide—the door was wide open, and Undyne was precariously close to the room and the dusty gore splattered all over it. The ceiling was too low to cling to and hide on, the desk was too small to duck behind, and no other cover existed. No windows, either—the only exit was through the door, which was the source of this whole problem in the first place.
He was too far away to close it, and if he tried to blurt out an explanation—say, "UNDYNE I'M IN A TRAP TO FRAME ME FOR MURDER DON'T COME IN DUMBASS!"—she wouldn't listen to the words of his warning, and could come in and see everything just as the enemy planned it.
There was nothing fragile he could see in the room to synch the knife to. No paper sticking out of the filing cabinet, no pencils lying on the brand-new desk…absolutely nothing. Synchronicity was still too weakened from transfusing JoJo's physical matter into Papyrus to break the sturdy desk or the suspiciously reinforced walls.
Which left him with only one, very painful option to get out of this without falling into one of the mothers of all clichés here. And he had to do it.
"…And then a hundred sit-ups after that, and maybe a 10-k sprint if they don't apologize hard enough!" Undyne muttered to herself, smirking evilly as she finished hashing out her plans to give 01 and 02 extra "endurance" training for falling victim to brainwashing.
Some small part of her said that she wasn't being fair—she had yet to discover exactly how the SOUL was brainwashing everyone, and for all she knew, it could've physically hijacked their bodies to do all this.
Surprisingly, she agreed with her conscience, and decided to cut the punishment down to 50 pushups and situps, and skip the 10-k run all together. She wasn't heartless, after all.
"And that doesn't matter now anyways!" she affirmed to herself as she strolled down the corridor. "What's important now is finding the cowardly jerk who's doing all this and pulverizing him!"
Before she could psyche herself up any more, she heard a bloodcurdling scream of "OH GOOOOOOD!", and the sound of metal hitting the hardwood floor.
Was that…right in front of her?
Presumably, the killer had intended for Undyne to enter the room, see the dead monsters, and then see JoJo with the knife used to kill them in his hands. This stock trick would likely have led to very lethal infighting, and the real killer-the SOUL—would get off scott free.
Undyne would have seen this and assumed that JoJo had killed them. Had the killer's plan worked as intended.
Instead, what she saw when she barged into the room were piles upon piles of monster dust…and an injured JoJo, cradling a stab wound going through his hand, the weapon used in the assault covered in his human, corporeal blood and lying in front of him.
So, Undyne's thoughts went in a different direction.
"Is this…an invisible assassin?!"
Summoning both her Stand and her full arsenal of spears, Undyne leapt over the door's threshold and onto the desk, scanning the room with her eye narrowed in concentration.
"Undyne…" JoJo called weakly, pushing himself to his feet with his good hand, and leaning on the desk for support. His eyes were tightly squeezed shut, and he ground his teeth together to endure his injury until the adrenaline kicked in.
"Did you see where they went?!" she demanded, looking down at JoJo with alarm. "What did they look like? And how did you get hurt that badly?"
"No…the fries…"
Joseph held up his hand, still spurting with blood. Oddly enough, the stab wound looked…odd. It didn't show the signs of a clear entry point for the knife, as if someone had just photoshopped it onto his hand. Had his Stand been stabbed instead?
Undyne blinked in bemusement, then nodded. "Right, healing! [The Messenger!]"
Howling its familiar battle cry of "ATATATATATATA!," the spectral knight burst through yet another wall, and returned moments later with the fries JoJo had left behind on his plate.
Gratefully, Joseph stuffed the magically-cooked food into his mouth, sighing in relief as the gaping hole in his hand faded away. "Would it have killed you to get the ketchup, too?"
"Mustard or go home," the fish monster declared, folding her arms in defiance of the disgusting, gooey condiment the human dared to mention.
"No, wait…screw that! What the hell happened here?"
She bent down to grab the offending knife, but her arm was batted away by a well-timed swipe of Synchronicity's vines. Turning to look at the Stand, she saw the exact wound she expected to see on its palm, just before it faded away into nothingness.
But…the angle was all wrong. She'd cut herself on her collection of combat-ready human replicas of giant swords to know exactly what could cause which kind of wound, and from what direction. Was that…self inflicted?
"Would you quit doing all this crap without thinking?!" Joseph finally opened his eyes, pointedly looking away from the knife. "Before you start ripping the entire town apart looking for this guy, I think you need to hear this. I found out how this guy's [Stand ability] works."
He frowned, squeezing his blood out of his scarf, then continued speaking.
"All that graffiti around town…that's his Stand's doing. When you read that shit, your body just does whatever it says. There's no control over your body, or hypnosis…it just happens. It's like when a really annoying song gets stuck in your head: you can't stop thinking about it, and you eventually just start humming or singing it when it leaks through."
Undyne stepped a few inches back in shock, her eyepatch sliding down a little to reveal the empty socket it concealed. "You just have to read it?!"
"That's what happened in here," Joseph explained through gritted teeth. "The second I came in here, I grabbed that knife and held onto it. Bastard knew you were coming, and was framing me for all of this fuckery. If you saw that…"
His implication was clear. And no matter how hard she could deny it, Undyne realized that JoJo was right. This was an insidious trap—one they had only escaped by a hair's breadth!
"Only way I broke it was by stabbing Synchronicity in the same hald holding the knife," he said, wiping sweat off of his forehead and sitting down on the surprisingly sturdy desk. "I had to hurt my hand badly enough that I couldn't hold the damn thing."
"What thing? You mean this?"
Appearing almost out of nowhere, Papyrus casually strolled into the room, walked right past the two of them, and grabbed the knife off of the floor in one smooth motion.
" 'HOLD ME?' "he read aloud, glancing at the blade's handle. "Oh, so it's a gift! Very well, invisible stranger! I, the Great Papyrus, will accept your gift! I'll hold you here!"
With that, he pocketed the blade in his shiny battle body's hollow cavity, giggling as the sharp implement tickled his spine slightly.
"…Oh, come on…" Joseph moaned. "That's…what comes to mind… for you?"
Snarling in irritation, Undyne hopped off of the desk and began pacing around the room, her hand to her chin in thought. "Crap…if his Stand's that potent, we'll need to be damn careful! We could try to go with our eyes closed…but it'd be hell finding the bastard. We could set a trap…but we're running low on time, and God knows what else he could write while we're sitting down and having a tea party as we wait for him to take the bait."
"Uh….Undyyyyyne."
She abruptly stopped near the desk again. Slowly, she and Papyrus turned around to face JoJo. He had never used that tone of voice before.
"…Yeah?" she asked hesitantly, her brows raised in confusion. "What's up?"
"Oh, it's just…" Joseph drawled, lazily moving his head and staring right above her. His pupils were heavily dilated, and glazed over in some sort of stupor.
"Was your hair always…a banana?"
"…Was it?" Papyrus asked uneasily, looking at Undyne's ponytail with genuine curiosity.
"No, it isn't!" she growled. Groaning in irritation, she stuck her tongue out, getting a taste of the air. Stale books, a hint of alcohol from the bar through the destroyed wall, and the unmistakable scent of dead monsters from the dust piles littering the room.
And, also, an acrid and unnatural smell, stemming from the unhealthily green veins on JoJo's formerly injured hand.
"Was there something in your burger?" Grabbing Joseph's plate, Undyne scanned the crumbs and grease left over from his dinner, her eye glued to the suspicious tablewear like a hawk!
JoJo lazily shook his head, his eyes darting all around the room in the process. "Nah, it tasted juuuuust like the ones back home…home…Granny Lucy? Why are you inside Papyrus's ribcage?
"Someone's inside me?!" Papyrus exclaimed, his hands already scrambling to feel inside of himself for intruders. "Are you alright in there? I apologize if it's too Spartan for most people: I try to limit the clutter! I, the Great Papyrus, pride myself on my skill in interior decorating!"
"Wait a second…if the food was drugged, shouldn't we all be affected by that?" Undyne leaned in closer to look at JoJo, ignored him trying to paw at her face, and looked at his hand.
Her investigation bore fruit when she saw the slight, tye-die discoloration in the veins of his hand, where he had been forced to plant the knife through his Stand's fist.
"The knife must've been poisoned!" she concluded. She hurled the now-useless plate past Papyrus's head, the dinnerware firmly embedding itself into the wall with a loud, resounding thud. "JoJo, you moron, you've been drugged!
"Drugs? Hey, I don't do that crap!" Joseph slurred in response, scoffing and swinging vaguely in Undyne's direction with tightly-clenched fists. "Screw you, pig!"
She facepalmed hard, and let go of Joseph's hand. Then, she manifested her spear in her grasp, and drove it hard through the office's desk, in a futile attempt to deal with her frustration.
"That's one of down already," she muttered. "And we're running out of time here."
"Time…Oh, that reminds me!"
Papyrus stopped examining his ribcage, having slowly deduced that JoJo's grandmother was not, in fact, inside of him, and pulled his hands out of his chest. In his skeletal grasp was, of course, a plate of spaghetti.
The dish looked awful, of course—Papyrus's choice to use snow as the sauce was baffling, and while using his blue curse to pin the noodles into the shapes and likenesses of everyone Papyus knew was interesting (if juvenile), it ruined the mature and sophisticated aesthetic he was aiming for!
"You two haven't had a chance to try my newest dish yet!" he said, carefully placing the plate on the ruins of the desk and sticking a fork and spoon into it. "Hurry, before it gets cold!"
Undyne moved to smack the plate aside, but her fist halted mere inches from impacting the pasta.
"We do not have time for this!" she repeated, drawing back her arm and summoning The Messenger to hoist JoJo over its shoulder. "Everyone's brainwashed by graffiti, one of us is baked out of his mind, and the villain behind all this is still out there! He's probably laughing his ass off at us right now!"
"Everyone? Oh, you must mean everyone outside!"
JoJo rubbed at his eyes, and squinted at Papyrus, still unsure why the entire world had turned into a kalidescope or why Papyrus was speaking in slow-motion with his old landlord's voice. "Wait…who's outside? Is it the Crips and Bloods screwing around again?"
"I'm…not sure who those are, but there is a huge crowd of people outside the inn!" Papyrus nonchalantly explained, ruefully putting away his spaghetti "There were outside when I came back!" he mentioned, as casually as one would discuss the weather or celebrity gossip. "They came out of nowhere!"
"The townspeople?" Undyne leaned around the broken wall to try and peer through the inn's windows, but it was too dark outside to see anything beyond a few indistinct shapes. It could be monsters…but it could just as easily be shadows cast by the building's candlelight, or just a trick of the eyes! Er, eye for her.
She darted across the room in a single split-second, her Stand trailing behind her with JoJo still slung over its shoulder. Turning to the side, she drew her hand back and punched the door with all of her might.
As her dramatic exits usually went, the door was sent sailing right off of its hinger and across the street, breaking into a thousand tiny splinters on the brick wall across her.
"Oh. That's low."
Papyrus jogged after her, and almost instantly he saw what had gotten her so riled up.
Standing right in front of the entrance, the mob of monsters was at least a hundred strong, and very few of them looked alike. What they all shared, though, was the blank, glassy stare in their eyes (or their equivalent therof).
The stare which they turned to Undyne and Papyrus, as one.
Papyrus felt something drip on his shoulder. Glancing at it with his peripheral vision, he saw that a gob of purple paint had dripped down from something above, and was now staining his otherwise spotless battle body with grime and…stains!
"I think they're all looking at the inn's sign!" he told Undyne, barely resisting the urge to look up and check for himself what the SOUL had no doubt written there.
He was met with a chorus of discordant laughter, from each and every single townsperson gathered before them.
It was the innkeeper who stepped forward first, her eyes still as glazed over as ever.
"So you things aren't totally brain-dead after all, huh?" she asked, in a voice not her own. It was way too smarmy and reedy to come out of someone like that.
"It managed to figure out how my [Smash Mouth] works?" Aaron picked up, having finally finished planking and rejoined the mob. He spoke in the same, alien voice the innkeeper had used. "Doesn't matter. I've already outsmarted you."
"Not that it's hard to outsmart some barely-sapient, snowflake freaks like those," 01 dismissively said, every hint of his personality having been yanked out of his voice and replaced with the SOUL's.
"After all, I am Jefferson Starship," 02 rumbled. I'm the smartest one His Holiness has on hand, and crushing some bugs like you is like swatting a fly. No effort whatsoever.
"You…bastard…" Undyne summoned forth her spear and moved to look around for the SOUL, before Papyrus's warning echoed in her ears and let her stop this fatal mistake right on time.
"Whuz? You found him?" JoJo couldn't see anything straight—being still in the middle of whatever vision quest or acid trip the poisoned knife had sent him on. "Oh…that's a lot of gang members. Not nearly enough to make it interesting, but…more than usual.
"Well, I gotta defend our territory!"
With his eyes rolled into the back of his head, JoJo looked up at the rooftops, spotting a vaguely purple figure squatting on top of the distorted and totally illegible graffiti he saw underneath him. Shifting in place, he leaned across the top of The Messenger's helmet and pointed a furious, accusatory finger vaguely in the SOUL's direction.
"You got that?!" he bellowed, his mouth briefly slipping out of a drooling stupor to return to his all but trademarked smirk. "I'm not leaving this place till I hunt that bastard down!"
- TO BE CONTINUED
Smash Mouth
User: Jefferson Starship/Purple SOUL
Stats:
Power: E
Speed: E
Precision: C
Durability: D
Range: B
Learning: S
Ability: Memetic Infection
Smash Mouth manifests as any writing implement its user wishes, although its text will invariably be colored purple. When someone reads the words it writes down, the idea of the action or message becomes heavily ingrained in their mind, to the point where they can do nothing but follow the words or orders endlessly, until they are given new ones by reading more text.
Due to their inherently strong wills, Stand Users are affected (very) marginally less. They retain control of their mental faculties, but their bodies still adhere to and mindlessly follow the orders they have seen-essentially bodily hijacking rather than full brainwashing.
