Chapter 12
A Well-Aimed Spear
The conversation died for a while after that. Stephen returned to cleaning glassware in silence, apologetically informing Alphys that he needed "some space to think" when she attempted once to interrupt his reverie. Rebuffed, Alphys went back to her computer for more research and pot noodles. Undyne said that she needed to take a break from nerd stuff with some actual, physical labor, and she disappeared into the basement, from which Stephen imagined he could dimly hear the occasional thump, bang, and snarl.
Somewhat more than an hour later she reappeared, smelling more fishy than usual and smudged with dirt and grease, but her smile was broad and her mood jaunty. "Got that old air compressor working, Alphy," she yelled out as she came up the stairs. "Seems to work with the drill anyway. I'm gonna shower and then I'm gonna wanna eat something. You two wanna join me?"
"Of course!" Alphys called out after hastily swallowing her mouthful of noodles.
Stephen looked in the box of labware he'd been working through; most of the few pieces that remained were cracked or in fragments. "Yeah, I could use a break," he replied.
Undyne disappeared again, out the rear door this time. "Our house is just a short walk from here," Alphys explained as Stephen and she watched Undyne go. "She'll c-clean up and change and be back in maybe twenty minutes. You, um, you wanna look at what I've f-found so far?"
Stephen took a seat next to her, pushing aside some stacked, empty noodle containers with an inward sigh. Practically the first thing Alphys had done when he reported to work was lecture him on lab safety, insisting on proper attire at all times and drilling into his head what to do in emergencies, but the diminutive scientist's safety consciousness had a blind spot when it came to eating in the lab. Stephen made a mental note to add clearing Alphys's desk of ramen bowls and pop bottles to his list of daily duties; Undyne was oblivious and the one time Stephen made the mistake of reminding Alphys to do it she had heaped so much abuse on herself for being a slob that Stephen hadn't the heart to press the matter any further.
"I've b-been specifically looking into organic materials that have been tried for t-transparent electrodes in solar cells and LEDs and things like that," she said, opening up a list of references she had been compiling. "What do you think?"
Stephen scrolled through the list. Alphys's note-taking was admirably meticulous; she had divided everything up into categories and subcategories, and she'd annotated each citation with a few words that told Stephen what Alphys thought would be promising to follow up: "looks fairly simple", "possible dead end", "worth a later look", and so forth. Stephen saw a lot of names that were at least somewhat familiar to him: polyaniline, polythiophene, graphene, carbon nanotubes.
"Looks good so far," Stephen said.
Alphys grinned and wagged her tail. "Thanks to your help I've been able to learn so m-much just in the past couple hours! When I was d-down in the Underground I'd never even heard of conducting polymers. None of the books I salvaged said a-anything about them. Plastics that conduct electricity, it's incredible! I've got so many ideas I want to try."
Stephen could believe it. You couldn't fake the sort of enthusiasm that burned in Alphys, nor the mastery she'd already achieved with little more than discarded textbooks to work from.
Yet she actually believes in a device that makes magic, Stephen reminded himself. It was a bit difficult to take. He idly wondered if there was some cultural explanation for Alphys's bizarre assertion about the CORE—maybe some superstition arising from the deaths or disappearances of Dr. Gaster and his team when building the machine, some taboo passed down through generations and meant to keep the monsters from messing with the thing.
Undyne's loud return to the lab brought an end to his wool-gathering. "TIME TO EAT PUNKS!" she hollered. Her new T-shirt was spotted with damp patches, droplets of water gleamed on her bare arms and dripped off her fins, and she balanced a pizza box with one hand. "Brought some leftovers from home. Join me in the breakroom nerds!"
Alphys and Stephen trooped to the breakroom, shedding their lab coats at the door. Stephen fetched a roast beef sandwich out of the fridge while Alphys grabbed a slice of day-old pepperoni pizza to eat cold and Undyne popped one in a toaster oven, impatiently bouncing up and down as it warmed up. "Even when you crank this thing up to 'broil' it's still so goddamn slow," she complained. "If you and Steve wanna do something useful, Alphy, you should invent an oven that doesn't take a year and a half to heat anything."
Stephen munched on his cold beef sandwich, looking with a trace of longing at the pizza. "What did you use Underground? Did you have ovens and stoves and whatnot?"
"We did," Alphys replied. "I, uh, I actually d-designed the appliances that were sold under the MTT brand. They ran off the power supplied by the CORE."
"Yeah, I had one of those," Undyne reminisced as she withdrew a blackened slice of pizza from the smoking toaster oven and munched on it with evident enjoyment. "Now that thing could cook. Burned my house down with it! But I gotta tell you, Steve, nothing's better for cooking than fire magic."
That damn word again! Stephen bit back the sarcasm that threatened to spoil his voice. "Undyne, are you saying that you were, uh, capable of making fire with...magic?"
"Me? Nah, never me! King—well, ex-King Fluffybuns, he can do it. And Toriel can. All I can do with magic is this." She stood in the center of the room and raised a partly-clenched fist. A moment later, her fist was grasping a luminous, aquamarine-blue spear, equal to her in height. She raised it in the air in an exultant pose. "Fuhuhuhu! That's the stuff!"
Stephen jerked backwards in his chair at the sudden materialization of the spear, and the uneaten half of his sandwich landed on the floor. "How—how did you do that?!"
"Magic, duh! Why are you acting so surprised, Steve? I've been learning a lot about your history lately and there was magic all over the place! Magical necklaces and jewels and brooches, warriors duking it out with magic bolts and blasts, magical princesses teaming up to fight—"
Alphys interrupted with her high-pitched giggle. "W-well, Undyne, sometimes those stories from, um, 'history' can b-be a bit exaggerated. And all that was from a l-long time ago. Humans today don't know anything about magic."
Stephen's eyes were focused on the spear. "D'you mind if I...look at that?"
"This? Let me make a more convenient sample for ya Steve." She held out her palm; a moment later, it held a glowing blue spear-head. "I can make them as big or as small as I like," she said, handing the object over.
Stephen hefted it gingerly in his hand. It was very light but otherwise felt solid and substantial enough. He tapped it experimentally against the table-top and tried looking through the object at the fluorescent lamp above him. He could see nothing but the object's intrinsic blue luminosity. "What's this made out of? Do you know?"
Alphys giggled. "It's not r-really made out of anything, Stephen. I'm p-pretty sure it's not matter, as you think of it."
"Nonsense! It's got physical properties, right? I can weigh this, get its volume, measure how hard it is…"
Undyne broke in. "But can you do this with matter?" She opened the hand that grasped her spear; Stephen watched it dissipate, within less than a second, into a whiff of blue phosphorescence. In another moment, she'd produced a replacement.
"And don't be t-too sure you can tell how hard that thing is, either," Alphys put in. "Try to scratch it with anything, even d-diamond, and you'll fail. But hit it hard enough…"
Undyne gripped her spear firmly and smashed a precisely judged fist into the shaft just above her grip. Cracks radiated outward from the point of impact, darkening the blue radiance of the spear like flaws in a sapphire. Then she let go the spear, and it dissolved.
Alphys gave a little coo of pleasure at the success of her scientific demonstration. "And if you hit it even harder…"
Undyne summoned yet another spear, gripped it hard and swung her fist into it. It burst into a hundred shining blue fragments; Stephen instinctively flinched to avoid them, but within moments all the of the glowing shards had vanished.
Alphys clapped her paws delightedly. Undyne grinned hugely and struck a biceps-flexing pose for her. "Yeah, not bad, huh Alphy? And there's a lot more where that came from…"
Stephen laughed. "All right, you've made your point, you two." He looked again at the glowing spear-head in his hand, hefting it meditatively. "Okay, Alphys...what if I tried to analyze this thing? What if I run its light through a spectrometer? What if I tried to dissolve it in acid, or shone a laser on it, or hit it with an electron beam?"
Alphys giggled. "I can't say that I tried all of th-those things when I was working Underground, but I did try s-some of them. I don't think you'll find any solvent that will touch it; I never did. And the spectrum of its light? A single, bright line at 490 nanometers—"
"Oh! That's, uh...four point nine oh times ten to the minus seven meters!" Undyne grinned.
"That's right! Oh, Undyne, you're so strong and clever...ah, um. S-sorry. Anyway, Stephen, the spectrum showed n-no other features. N-no other lines, no background continuum. Just one line."
Stephen tried to weigh everything he knew, everything he'd ever studied and ever done, against the stubborn existence of the spear-point in his palm, calmly radiating away at 4900 angstroms. "Undyne, can I, uh, keep this?"
"Sorry, Steve, the spears and arrows I make, they don't last forever. Not unless I want them to, if that makes any sense? Maybe if I focused on keeping that spear-head around, you'd be able to stick it in your pocket and find it there later. But first time my mind wandered onto food, or my girlfriend's sexy tail…" The spear-head evaporated from Stephen's hand.
Stephen said nothing. He spied the fallen remnants of his roast beef sandwich, scooped them up from the floor and tossed them into the trash.
"You, uh, you okay there Steve?" Undyne asked.
"Huh? Yeah, I'm fine...it's just. Heh. It's a bit much to process." He looked back and forth between the two monsters in front of him. "Undyne, can all monsters do what you've just done?"
"Summon glowy blue pointy things? Nah, that's just what I can do. But all monsters have—"
"Most monsters, Undyne." The brittleness in Alphys's tone caught Stephen's attention. The scientist's eyes were studying the tabletop. "Most monsters."
"Oh. Um, sorry, Alphy...anyway, Steve, lots of monsters have different things they can do. Some can do a bit more than others. My magic's pretty boring in comparison to what someone like, say, Toriel can do. Alphy here's just put more work into studying mine 'cause I was always hanging round her at the old lab anyway." She reached for the little scientist's paw and kissed her on the snout. At this Alphys looked up and smiled.
"Hm." Stephen stood up and paced. "Well...I know a bit of chemistry and a few other things, but I don't know that I'm too qualified to help you with magical studies."
"That's really not wh-what we're about here, Stephen," said Alphys, looking glum. "I c-came to the Surface wanting to l-learn more about human science and that's why I want your h-help, because you're a human scientist."
Sort of, Stephen thought. "And I'll help you as much as I can," he said aloud. "But it's gonna be a bit tough in the lab, grinding up potassium bromide mulls or sweating to get a few extra percent yield out of some reaction or other, when you've got a lab partner who can summon perfectly monochromatic light sources at will."
"Very pointy ones," Undyne boasted.
"We sh-should go back to work," said Alphys. "On some real human science. Will that satisfy you for now, Stephen?"
"Yeah, I guess so." Undyne tossed the pizza box with its single remaining piece into the fridge as Stephen followed Alphys out of the breakroom. "But I'm not done with this topic by a long shot. And what does any of this have to do with a geothermal power station?"
"W-would you believe, Stephen…" replied Alphys in a small voice, "...it's still k-kind of a mystery to me too?"
