Title: Better than Ding Blasters

Rating: K

Feat: Sans, Gaster, Frisk, Papyrus (kinda), Grandpa Semi (kinda)

Word Count: 1,719

Even though months had passed since taking it, Frisk still hadn't figured out what the heck that was that she had found in Sans' secret room. She still had the key that she took from his drawer, dangling uselessly on her keychain even now. Useless because, after their house and shed and everything were moved up to the surface with lots of help, Sans changed the locks on his secret room so that not even nosy, time-warping children could find their way inside.

Frisk had taken offense to being called a nosy time-warping child. As soon as she got a chance to snoop in Sans' room again, which was only once in a blue moon, she looked to find the new key. She couldn't find it in his drawer this time. She almost considered resetting a couple times until she could find it, but that would probably be going too far.

Honestly, it wasn't like she understood anything that she found in there the first time anyway. What was the harm explaining it to her?

He said some things were better off locked up. He didn't even go into that room anymore, he said, so what business did she have? Sans did have a point, but the child had trouble still determining what was her business and what wasn't.

Every so often she just found herself thinking about all that. Sitting inside, putting off her homework, she turned the old silver key over in her hands. Then the child ran her fingers along Sans' room key, which was also useless by now, and chewed on the insides of her mouth. What was worth locking away?

A plate of fresh pie made a little clunking sound as Toriel set it down beside her, and Frisk thanked her with a smile. But she only took a few bites before lethargy set in, and the child put down her head to sleep.

In the middle of the night, sometimes little things or big things would wake Sans up. In New Home it was pretty noisy, after all. Lots of people pushed into such a cramped space, lots of loud monsters, there was always bound to be something. Over time he managed to tune out most of the noise, but every once in a while something caught him off guard. It made him very tired when he went in to work, although usually he didn't mind that. He would just drink extra coffee and be all right again before he crashed sometime in the evening. But by then, Papyrus could handle things. Kind of.

It was worse when he was woken up by things completely unrelated to the noisy New Home. Like Grandpa Semi banging around on the second floor trying to find something, or a phone call from work.

More specifically he would sometimes get woken up by a phone call from Ding-dong, as he liked to call him.

It was like that again. He felt that he had only slept for about an hour or so before hearing the phone ring by his bedside. Groaning wearily, knocked out of the lovely dream he had been having, Sans reached over and answered it. He knew who it probably was long before he heard that weird, distorted speech in what could tentatively be called his ear.

"(SANS. SANS! ARE YOU UP?)"

Even though Gaster was too oblivious to speak in regular English fonts, Sans could understand him just fine and could hear how excited he was. Although he usually was excited. He yawned before replying, "yeah i'm up. at least I am now. what's the big emergency?"

"(SANS I DISCOVERED SOMETHING REALLY BIG YOU WILL NEVER BELIEVE.)"

"did you find out how to break the barrier?"

There was a little bit of static on the other side as his cousin struggled not to say no when I was clearly the correct, if disappointing, answer. He couldn't say it was better than breaking the barrier, either, although he almost said that, too. The garbled noises coming out of his flustered cousin almost made him smile, until finally he heard, "(–I'M–WORKING ON IT. YOU–CAN'T RUSH–THAT.)"

His amusement over, tiredness set in. "why did you call me at three in the morning."

Now Gaster screeched into the phone, loud enough that Sans was almost afraid that Papyrus was going to wake up in the other room… And then he would inevitably wake up their grandfather, and then the entire house would be up, and he would never get back to sleep. He was right about to hang up until the screeching turned into words again, "(GO OUTSIDE I WILL SHOW YOU. I WILL DIRECT YOU.)"

"i'm not going outside. it is way too early," Sans grumbled, almost inaudibly compared to his cousin's shouting.

"(OKAY FINE YOU CAN DO IT INDOORS IF YOU'RE REALLY QUIET ABOUT IT.)"

Quiet was something that Sans did better than anyone else in their family, and surely by now Gaster understood that much. "okay, what exactly is it that I'm doing..?" He yawned.

"(I DISCOVERED A NEW ATTACK!)" Evidently the excitement was too much to contain any longer. "(I! DISCOVERED! A NEW! SKELETON MONSTER ATTACK!)"

"you what."

"(TRY IT TRY IT TRY THE ATTACK.)"

"what attack what are you talking about."

"(SANS SANS TRY THE ATTACK!)"

Well… At least his excited side was better than his creepy science side. Although both of them kept Sans up at night, as it turned out. And he had no idea what the hell he was going on about now. It seemed like any moment the babbling was going to turn back into screeching, if he wasn't careful. So before that could happen, Sans started to talk just a little bit louder, "okay ding-dong i'm going to do this for you, but you have to do something for me first."

"(EH?)" Sans sighed and covered his face with one hand. It was too early for this. "(EH? EH? WHAT?)"

"i need you to take a deep breath and hang up."

"(BUT IF I HANG UP I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW TO DO THE ATTACK?)"

"yeah can we do this later?"

"(NOOOO PLEASE?)"

"or can you send me a picture or something?"

"(AW.)"

"too tired."

"(AW SANS.)"

"sorry buddy."

"(IT'S A BIG CANNON.)"

Now that gave him pause. "what."

Technically speaking, almost every attack the skeleton could do was related to bones. Not even a variation of bones either. It was always the same kind of bone, just bigger or longer or smaller. Throwing them, sending them along the ground, sending them along the air, things like that– all the different attacks related to that weren't terribly creative. Papyrus, as he recalled, was trying to spell something out with his but hadn't gotten any farther than a solitary "P".

The only hope for more variety was to dabble in other kinds of magic. Both Sans and Papyrus, for example, had a propensity for blue magic, albeit of two different shades.

Gaster liked to call them "the Blues Brothers" as a joke. Sans' accent didn't help.

But regardless, none of that magic was anything close to a cannon. "you mean a cannon, cannon?"

"(IT'S A BIG MAGIC CANNON!)" Now that his cousin was also showing interest, Gaster began to speak even faster. "(I KNEW I WAS ON TO SOMETHING, I'VE BEEN WORKING ON THIS FOR WEEKS! YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN ME IN THE TRAINING ROOM AN HOUR AGO, I DECIMATED THE DUMMY, IT WAS LIKE NOTHING YOU'VE EVER SEEN!)"

"holy crap." Sans was already getting out of bed and looking for his clothes. "you stay there okay? i'm coming over."

"(I THOUGHT IT WAS TOO EARLY?)"

"yeah well make some coffee for me. i wanna make a cannon too."

If possible, he thought that he heard Gaster smiling on the other end of the line. "(OKAY!)"

"hey this is a completely new attack, right? doesn't even have a name?" Sans was already trying to picture it as he put his lab coat on, searching for his shoes. Oh well, it was the middle of the night. He would put on slippers, nobody was going to mind. "right?"

"(IF YOU WERE THINKING ABOUT NAMING IT AFTER YOURSELF YOU'RE TOO LATE.)"

He snorted indignantly, "i was not– what," before suppressing a laugh and covering his face for one second. "oh my god. you did not."

"(I'M CALLING THEM GASTER BLASTERS BECAUSE THEY ARE AWESOME LIKE ME AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME.)"

"ding-dong no."

"(TOO LATE I'M DOING THE PAPERWORK.)"

"well jeezus now I have to come over there just to knock some sense into you."

"(I'M DOING THE PAPERWORK THEY'RE CALLED GASTER BLASTERS.)"

Hanging up, if only for a second, Sans only chuckled some more before he disappeared from the house, none of his other family members any wiser to his absence for now. The next place the he appeared was the lab in Hotland, where he would discover to his horror that he was actually too late, and the new cannon attack that was discovered for skeleton monsters were indeed now called Gaster Blasters.

Oh well. They turned out to be so powerful that it was unlikely Sans, or anyone else, would have to use them or even explain what they were.

Without any answers, Frisk woke up from her dream.

It was a silly dream.

Author's Note: I keep having ideas for ASL aftermath stuff, but at the same time I also wanted to show my own version of Dr. Gaster in this series (although he probably won't show up in the present that much.) So that's all this is.

Turns out that I see him as an energetic, over-excitable and egotistical dork along the same lines of Papyrus. 0 0 The fact that he also speaks in all caps is the only reason I can give for this. None of the human children who met him found him nearly as endearing, though.