Gaster and Gaster met in an interstice, a not-place between worlds, somewhere that didn't even have a number according to the classification system. There were very few rules here (unfortunately, "you can't create mass/energy or independent spacetime" was one of them) and little of importance to do - unless you were a Gaster or something like him, communicating with your alternate through carefully prescribed mutual agreement that prevented words from being used as actual weapons.

"You erred in getting Charles' daughter involved," Gaster told his counterpart. "He will kill you for that."

"The girl was a necessary instrument, not my goal," the other Gaster replied dismissively. "I did not anticipate the chain of events, but I found the end state acceptable. Your Chara is very good at removing his counterparts, and I am pleased that I was able to find one like him after so long searching. I needed him to settle things after Chara betrayed me." Gaster looked at his counterpart in silent questioning. "With my assistance, the influencable creator entity created that Heaven of his. I had intended to cooperate with him for my own research before he banished us, as the entity responds poorly to my thoughtforms, but he defected on our arrangement. I lament the time it took to find a destroyer-Chara, devise a method to summon him, and have him win his battle, and I lament losing access to the creator entity, but I feel that the end result was worth my expenditures. Defectors must be punished, after all."

"Your end result was not worth your expenditures, as you still got Charles' daughter involved," Gaster reiterated. "You failed to consider my own terms of cooperation with him, and I failed to convey the immediacy of my statement. He will kill you for that now." There was something else in that un-space with the two Gasters, something very powerful, very dark, and very, very angry. The other Gaster immediately constructed a metamaze of deadly traps around himself, a series of impossibly convoluted N-dimensional waves of Bad Time to kill anything approaching him, full of undefining erasers, memetic attacks, infohazards, and things for which even the most imaginative Earthlings had no concepts. It was utterly, completely futile. Charles slashed through it on every level that things could possibly be slashed and other ways that would have been impossible everywhere else.

"Knight! I require your aid!" the other Gaster screamed before the last vestiges of him were torn to pieces and merged with the nothingness around them, their information destroyed.

"Who or what is Knight?" Charles asked Gaster, the only one remaining.

"I don't know," Gaster replied, simply and honestly. "But I assume it is your next target." He resolved to be extra polite when asking Michelle's and Sheila's permission to study that 34(b) of theirs.


The door had been installed on the other side of the portal, Gaster's studies completed. The high adept songstress dress sat on a wooden hanger, ready to be worn. (Michelle resolved to wear it more in the near future, while she still could. She was still growing, after all.) The Gluesword sat on wall hooks, ready to be pulled down at a moment's notice. (A major adhesive company had analyzed the glue, recognizing it as a variant of one of their products, and she told them to refill it. Instead of charging her for it, they publicly announced what they'd done. Several major retailers ran out of their products within hours.) The Glowshard had turned out to be radioactive after all, but not a particularly dangerous kind; it was full of perfectly ordinary tritium, and it sat on her end table, merrily glowing away as a nightlight.

There was another nightlight as well. Sheila laid down next to her on the large bed, pointing to the ceiling, experimenting with different colors of light. She started at a violet, then went down through blue and green, yellow, orange, and red, and then past red. She could emit light she couldn't see? Furrowing her brow, she went back up the spectrum, going past violet this time.

"Don't mess with ultraviolet or anything past that too much, you can seriously hurt somebody," Michelle warned. "And don't mess too much with really way-down infrared frequencies either, you can interfere with phones and network stuff."

"That's the same as light?"

"Yep! And for something even weirder, check this out. If I say that I want two identical, coherent sources of light," she explained as she magicked her phone into her hand and pressed some buttons, "this happens." She pressed the go button, the phone said a rapid-fire stream of syllables, and an intricate pattern of violet light and darkness illuminated the ceiling. "The waveforms interfere with each other. You can do something like this from one source and get the same thing, it'll interfere with itself."

"What?" Sheila asked, confused and disturbed.

"That's how it works, no joke," Michelle replied. "That's not just magic, that's how light actually works when you do that."

Sheila's head flumphed down on the generous stock of pillows. Sirale was not among them; one of the other kids was cuddling him that night. "It's too much right now, I have so much economics to learn," she replied.

Among everything that she had to learn about, that dismal science was the most critical. The basics of uplifting an economy directly from feudalism to fusion (with no fossil fuels in between) were familiar to the specialists, as this was not humanity's first rodeo in that general arena; the Japanese government in particular had a lot of key pointers to offer, as a gate to a Type 3 (similar to a Type 1, only with more gods) had opened in Tokyo's Ginza district while Frisk was still a teenager. An invading army of swordsmen and (biological) orcs had learned the very hard way that the locals had magical powers, overwhelmingly superior military technology, a rapid-deployment portal network, and an enthusiastic murdergod on speed dial. (The conversation between that murdergod and the priestess of the other side's murdergod was surprisingly amicable.) It didn't take long before nearly all of Earth's dimensional portals originated from Earth.

King Asgore, who had done much of the organizational work of establishing her initial government himself, had warned Sheila in his deep voice that she couldn't meaningfully make decisions about anything until she understood it, and even with doubled time and the world's best teachers, it would take her several months to grasp the full extent of the word 'infrastructure' in a mid-21st-century economy, and they had to start building one before that; architects and city planners were frantically submitting their bids already.

Chara had well and truly beaten the Cantopians into submission, so the cops that the Dreemurrs had brought out of retirement had only a handful of immediate problems to deal with; the provisional code of laws was very basic and immigration was more or less outlawed due to the risk of exploitation. (Some NGOs had offered to provide humanitarian aid; Asgore had politely declined.) The Dreemurrs had established healing centers, where Chara's former singers focused on patients while the Song of Healing was constantly broadcast through speakers. This service was available for the low, low price of $12,000 and the US government paid for it half the time, and people were being portaled in at the rate of one a minute and rising. (Literal conveyor belts were to be installed shortly.) The agreement gave the Cantopian government an immediate income source and the Dreemurr family an even larger fortune with generous salaries for everyone involved. There was an argument- often made on the news- for the shock being worse on Earth than Cantopia, as the medical establishment was largely shattered and quite a few doctors and nurses announced their upcoming retirement. Asriel had openly discussed this as a problem, even as he helped open the centers himself; just because humanity had gained access to this power did not mean that humans ought to rely on it.

There were bright sides, of course. Sheila had picked up the local customs of Mt. Ebbot and many of the general national customs of the United States within hours, and she socialized well with the other kids in Toriel's school. (She still had to be tutored separately, as her skills and knowledge were all over the place from a 21st-century perspective.) Her accent was musical, but her rasp was completely gone; she talked a lot like Michelle, and she had an extreme knack for social situations in a way that Michelle frankly envied. On the other hand, she'd needed Michelle to explain to her that the people running her government were, and would need to be, loyal to the Dreemurr family and not some other group or ethos. There were people chomping at the bit to exploit Cantopia and everyone in it in a million different ways.

"I wish the Song of Faith worked here, when I go home, I'm going to have it sang on me all the time," Sheila lamented, glancing at the portal. Asriel didn't want her to go anywhere where songs worked until he was sure that the magic gene had well and truly taken root.

"The Song of what?" It was Michelle's turn to be confused and disturbed.

"The Song of Faith, it makes you more confident. We sang it regularly." Chara used it as a disloyalty detector; rebels under its influence were far easier to identify. "I know, you don't have a spell for that."

Dog, they have mind-altering spells there and she's talking about using one on herself?! "I wouldn't want a spell for that!" Michelle almost shouted but avoided waking up her siblings. "That's... a guarantee to make bad decisions!"

Sheila looked utterly lost and even a little upset. "Are you saying that a queen shouldn't be confident?!"

Michelle stared at her alternate. "I'm saying that you should only be confident if you know what you're doing is right! Look- I know-" Michelle put her thoughts in order, figuring out what Sheila believed and what the disconnect was. "I know that your only actual experience of this is a guy who thought that everything he was doing was right, just because he was the king, but that is not how it works. If you want to be an actually good ruler, you should never be completely confident. You might have to pretend to be, but you should never actually be too sure of yourself. The only way to actually be right is to find ways that you might be wrong. And even then, sometimes, you just have to choose anyway." Winning the war had been brutal, but winning the peace was the really tough part.

"I'm happy we have the time thing," Sheila replied.

"You're not going to know within a day if a decision was right or not, not for the big stuff," Michelle said, sighing.

"So I can't be sure if I'm doing the right thing, and even if I am wrong, I'm still the queen. On Cantopia, I'm inviolate. So I'm responsible for everything, and even if I'm blamed, it doesn't matter." Michelle wondered how great Sheila's social intelligence really was, for her to begin grasping an entirely unfamiliar ethical system so quickly.

"Crowns are heavy," Michelle replied, and Sheila got the metaphor. "Also, it kind of does matter, because if you really screw up, the people there will be demanding democracy or something." One subsistence agrarian being a figurehead (so far) of a hard-uplifted society was bad enough; one and a quarter million of them actually trying to make uninformed decisions would be vastly worse.

"Gary explained that to me, and it still just seems so weird."

"Oh, you don't need me to tell you about this, you've got your boyfriend to tell you," Michelle teased.

"He is not my boyfriend." She said it in a particularly mischievous, 'exact words' way, but it didn't imply that they weren't dating; rather, it was a movement in the other direction, but what was above 'boyfriend'?

Michelle stared at her counterpart in complete shock. "You're kidding. You have to be kidding. You just met him! Are you serious?! King Gary?!" There were a lot of other things she could have said, about the sheer idea of marrying so young, but none of them applied to the ruling queen of an alien planet.

"'The politics, the logistics, and the love all pass muster,'" Sheila said, and Michelle knew who she was quoting immediately.

"Oh Dog. Dad really said that. He's eleven, Sheila."

"Well, we're not getting married yet," Sheila said. "Your grandma said 'we have plenty of time to be sure', so we're going to have the wedding on my fourteenth birthday." The Cantopian 'year', a full cycle of the solar spot's movement, was exactly 360 days long. The difference between the Cantopian and Earth days was a handful of milliseconds, and time on Earth passed a teensy bit slower due to motion and gravity wells. "And you, dear sister, will only be thirteen," she said with a deliberately haughty affect.

Michelle sat up. "I have experienced at least three and a half more years of life than you have, and you know it." The Dreemurr kids became rememberers at age nine.

"And in all that time, no one has ever done this," Sheila said, also sitting up with her hands innocently in front of her, and Michelle saw the incoming pillow in her peripheral vision and shot up a hand to block it before it knocked her in the head.

"Against me? You must have a death wish!" Michelle theatrically clenched her fist and six pillows rose like zombies. She snapped her fingers and they all flew at their target at once. Sheila would surely one day develop the same multiple-objects control as Michelle had, but, before then, she could do little against the converging attack other than block and duck.

Knowing how she was outclassed, Sheila simply grabbed one of the pillows with her mind, flinging it, intending to do them one at a time. Michelle ducked down, simply taking it in the head, and Sheila didn't have any idea what Michelle was doing until the blankets and sheets rose up under her, as Michelle telekinetically yanked Sheila's feet downwards, swiftly flipping her around and wrapping her up.

"You're marrying my brother? Fine, you can sleep in his bed, Your Majesty. I'll take you right to him, just like this."

"Okay. With your blankets."

"Oh, fine, I guess you're r-" This time, Michelle did not see the telekinetic pillow coming at all, and it caught her in the back of the neck. "How are you my alternate?!"

Sheila laughed, but it seemed forced, and untangled herself from the blankets. "I think the gravity is getting to me, maybe it's the vaccinations or the magic, maybe just the food, but I've been feeling really weird, and... down there, I've been..." She trailed off and looked away.

"Wait, are you having your period too?" Sheila looked at her blankly. "You know, menstruation, the thing that happens to girls our age?" The blank look continued. "Oh Dog, nobody ever told you?!" Michelle visibly shuddered, her arms vibrating with shock. The idea that nobody had ever told Sheila about this stuff was sharply disturbing. Both Asriel and Arial had explained to Michelle in exacting detail last year what she could expect, what it would do to her, and what she could do about it; she'd telekinetically eased the whole thing out that morning in the bathroom and worried no more about it. (There were many things she did not envy the girls who lived in the 'before-time' for, and not being able to do that was decisively one of them.) "Okay, we have to get to the bathroom, I'm glad we already told you how that plumbing works..."


If someone had, five years ago, asked Michelle what she'd be doing in four years, she might have answered with a lot of things that would seem weird and fantastic to a pre-Return Westerner. Absolutely none of them would have involved the truly lavish, splendidly royal wedding of her alternate-dimension counterpart and her younger brother. For one thing, she couldn't imagine that he'd pick up the responsibilities of an actual king - a king with a real job, to help his queen move Cantopia from an agrarian idyll straight to a 21st-century, fusion-powered, portal-networked paradise. That was the thing with Gary, Michelle recognized - he saw people in need, and he had to help them, regardless of context or personal cost. This had put him at the right place and the right time to become engaged with Queen Sheila Dreemurr, and it'd also put him in the right mindset to shepherd almost one and a half million people (Michelle's estimate had been off) towards a better civilization.

The economics had been surprisingly easy, even as the teens' royal authority grew from figureheads to actual rulers. There were no fossil fuels on Cantopia, no elements heavier than bismuth on the whole planet. There were a surprisingly large number of rare earths- the creator entity hadn't known nor cared about their rarity on Earth- and the lack of anything resembling latitude (the anentropic solar spot moved, the planet did not spin) made it much easier to portal around. The mining and farming had gone from an initial state-owned system, which had made Cantopia the equivalent of a giant, benevolent company town, to a mostly market-based system. (The Internet was screaming the whole time, of course. Michelle had told her counterpart in very elaborate and detailed terms why not to listen to the Internet.) There were more roads devoted to auto racing than to actual transportation, the sky reserved for private planes, winged monsters, and one particularly flappy Darkner. Cantopians had taken a surprising liking to golf once some Earthlings had shown it to them, and the courses were considerably larger to match the lower gravity. There was not a single 'lower-class' Cantopian in existence, a planet of all lords and no peasants, with wealth often being measured in productive acres and robotic equipment (the maintenance guys were some of the richest people in that world), and the assorted vices of Earth did not, as a rule, take root there; Gary and Sheila worked constantly to prevent any sort of decadence or addiction from taking hold, and Gary had eventually employed as Praetor the one person he knew was absolutely committed to justice, no matter what: his older brother, James, who had finally fully taken the mantle of the role last month.

There were weird problems, though, the monsters among them. Cantopians had never lived with monsters, and all of them could sing; that had made some of them actually dangerous to people in a way that Earth monsters were not, and a lot of them were actually aggressive in a way seldom found on Earth. (Trauma, Frisk had explained. The monsters were manifestations of the Cantopians' lifelong trauma from being under the thumb of a supernatural lunatic, and it would take decades before they would be able to get over it.) Whatever the creator entity had done to Cantopians made them genetically incompatible with Earthlings without serious bioengineering; fortunately, that was a thing they had access to, and that was why Sheila was meeting her in their personal playground, along with her plushie, grandmother, and brother, of course- her brother, the King, the father of Sheila's twin girls, who were expected to be born in eight months or so. Gary is going to be a dad. Mom's going to be a grandma. Grandma's going to be a great-grandma. I'm going to be an aunt. It was just so weird to think about.

The babies would, as both Sheila and Gary had absolutely insisted, spend their formative years in a place where both kinds of magic worked, and there was only one of those. With Dreemurr resources, it was not terribly difficult to build a nursery just for them, and Sirale was the perfect caretaker for very young Lightners when their parents couldn't be around. That was what the six of them had come together to discuss, and Michelle could barely even follow some of the conversation, as Toriel patiently discussed what was and wasn't appropriate to have around very young children, and why this piece of furniture needed to be there, and how things could grow with the girls as they grew older. Frisk, in her light and practiced voice, talked about daycare practices and how they affected the growth of children, and Michelle abruptly got the very stark, very obvious idea that Frisk had done the same thing with her. How much of herself was from her altered genetics, how much from her careful upbringing, and how much from her intrinsic nature, her purple SOUL? And the children, who would they be? Their SOULs weren't called back from a child long dead, as hers was (and she tried not to think about that too much).

There was something else on her mind, something she didn't want to tell her family and that she and Sheila rarely discussed. The truth was that how they were doing this meant more to her than why. It had turned out that Sirale had a little power, after all, something that he was good at, namely moving the walls of that pocket universe around. Not much, not at once - and certainly not something like bringing the fountains closer together - but just a little at a time, a little alteration to the structure of that particular 34(b). An impossibility, in a way that the creator entity was an impossibility, in a way that creating any universe at all was an impossibility.

She never did get the creator's entity's last words to her out of her mind. "I'll see you again when you become goddesses!" it had cheerfully bid them farewell with. Killing an evil entity, taking over another universe, establishing a paradise, having children - those things were very good to do, and emotional to experience, but they were not the same as having the ability to alter reality - to use science and magic to do what the creator entity did, because if it did it, then so could she. To become, as it were, an actual goddess.

Her challenge ever in front of her, Michelle wondered when she'd see that entity again.