Chapter 13: A Gamble Against Megalomania

The coming few minutes were getting erased and repeated, repeatedly. His memory didn't cover erased time reliably, but things were starting to blur in for Sans. It was enough that he wasn't helped much by the reference he had for questioning Chara, since he remembered it. While the first few rounds had been essentially free wins, the boy had figured him out and was alert to battle when he stepped into his save point. He still hadn't made it past the initial barrage. But maybe this time, or the next, he'd manage.

Then Chara walked into the room, apprehensive for the first few seconds as always. Then the power of time wavered and his expression changed. He went from not knowing what would happen to knowing what had happened in the near future. He was starting to comprehend the situation, angered but with a certain cold determination. Perhaps it was time to hammer in a different point.

"What makes you think that what you do is justified?" Sans asked, keeping a wary eye on where his attention was. "Because we're just monsters? You of all people should know that monsters are people too. All monsters have family and friends just the same as humans do. All monsters have their own feelings and thoughts. I'm not the only one who has lost someone dear because of you." No, no, stay patient a bit. He might not remember where to pick this particular argument up, at least not clearly. "Why do you end their lives?"

In older parts of his mind, he knew what the reasons used to be. This used to be a game; the girl used to be nothing more than a puppet for those playing, the boy used to be a mirror for those playing. They would not comprehend this as a world, at least not until they started believing and he, or someone else, started saying certain things. Apparently, they'd done well enough to make them believe that a world was building around them. If the reasons were the same, the foundation of belief might crumble.

Chara's eyebrows turned angry and the negativity around him intensified. "Why the hell does anyone else matter!? In this world, it's kill or be killed. That's what my father taught me."

Father instead of player. "Really now, your father said that?"

"The weak ones deserve to die as the strong ones fight each other for dominance," he said. "But the weak ones try to dominate by forcing guilt and honor on the strong ones. And it stupidly works most of the time because of peer pressure and fear of punishment from breaking morality. People don't want to raise their LOVE to get the power to change things because they give too much heed to what other people think. Like that dumbass Asgore could have been a god by now and ruled the world once he realized that a monster with one human soul could pass through the barrier. He may seem strong, but his heart and mind are too weak to do what is needed. He's no ruler when he lets himself be ruled."

That kind of philosophy sent a chill through his bones. Then again, with Chara believing in that, he was best suited to deal with this demon. This was the reason his magic worked the way it did even though he'd once been ashamed of it. "Then morals mean nothing to you?"

"Nothing, not since I discovered something years ago." Chara's negativity was still strong, but he chuckled with a mad inflection. "Me, my father, even this girl that I snatched a body from, we're different from all the rest of you. Morals don't apply to us, they mean nothing to us. And you know why that is? It's because our hearts are hollow."

"Never heard of that," Sans lied. But it made perfect sense now that he'd said it.

And he was smug about it too. "I'm not surprised. People's hearts are full of various traits, in both humans and monsters. Faith, hope, joy, patience, justice, even love; they have lots of things filling their hearts and obscuring what they're truly capable of. But people like me, we're missing a whole bunch of those traits. I have determination and that's about it. My insight into the world is a lot clearer than yours and from that, I can see that this is just all some insane farce trying to avoid facing the true rule of the world: kill or be killed."

There was an idea that took a certain risk. At this point, all risks were worth it. Sans leaned against a pillar within Chara's view. "Sounds to me like you're missing out on a lot of what the world is, being like that."

"Perhaps," he said, looking down. "I knew I was different since I was young; not knowing why is an uncomfortable place to be. Plus all the scolding I got for things I couldn't grasp."

"I had thought that if a kid like you got some good pals and had a good time, you'd be happy where you were instead of trying to leave," Sans said, using a lighter tone of voice.

He snorted but seemed defeated in it. Seemed. He was coming closer. "Don't talk to me about happiness. I can't be happy in simple things, it's literally impossible with the way my heart is. I have to be pushed to my limits to start to feel. Like my dad said, we never feel thrilled except at the edge of death. And he proved it to me with stunts like hanging me out the window, or telling me that an amusement park ride wasn't functioning right before the coaster took off. He tricked me into killing my own mother."

"Did he now?" Sans said, playing along.

"Yeah, he kept taunting me that I was a powerless idiot and said that would prove my worth to him," Chara said sadly. What he didn't remember was that monsters could feel intentions and to one well trained to read it… there was a perverse pride in recalling this tale. "So I did and he left me hanging while the people around me started calling me a cursed devil child. I went to jail before I was ten and only escaped because of that earthquake. And I went up the mountain because I knew they wouldn't follow me, save maybe that my dad was up there since he took advantage of that kind of thing. I certainly didn't mean to end up down here."

That last statement was debatable. And Chara was close enough now that he could make a quick lunge and stab him now. Keeping calm with a light tone, using a false sparkle of the open heart, Sans replied, "That's harsh. Kids shouldn't have to go through things like that."

He managed a doe-eyed look in the girl's body, using cuteness to his advantage. "You understand me now, huh?" The intent to kill was sharpened.

"Better than before."

"So could you forgive me?" He kept eye contact, trying to draw attention from his fingers wrapping around the knife's handle.

Looking him in the eyes, Sans waited a couple seconds. "No."

CRACK

The judgment hall was quiet, but Sans felt a shiver in his spine. He had a feeling that Chara was going to be pissed when he hit his save point. Checking his reference... yup, real pissed off. Yes, he did understand better. But he was not about to forgive him (or her) for any reason. After all, that was no Mercy. That was trying to get him to drop his defenses. Knowing that both of these kids had hollow hearts, he knew they held no mercy.

But that was a feeling from one ended time lingering into the next reload. This was messing with him severely. Then again, he knew Chara wouldn't give up until he won. This was a hopeless battle on his part. But if he endured long enough, then in another timeline, Papyrus, Wing, and even he himself had the potential to find peace and happiness.

Footsteps sounded. Recalling the potent negativity and intent just now, Sans reacted in getting ready to attack, only to get countered by his own power. He looked over and there was a different child entering the room. Also a girl and a boy sharing the former's body, this pair was younger. More innocent, as both of their LOVE ratings were 1. The boy seemed unstable, but the girl was powerfully determined and positive. And with them were that cat and himself.

"Sorry about that," he said to them, although probably only the other Sans had noticed. "I'm on edge here, with what's going on."

The girl was confused a bit, but Sans said, "Don't worry about." And she decided to trust him, both of him. "We pulled you back earlier than you had been to set this up. Here." He tossed over a silver device, like a thick pen.

"One of Dad's puzzle devices?" he asked. He recognized it as the work of the third Dr. Gaster, but remembering what it was specifically would take shifting through parts of his mind he wasn't using at the moment.

Or the other Sans could explain, "A seal switcher, made so puzzle pieces could be put under separate seals and the player was forced to switch the seals around in order to get the pieces lined up right. But this one is linked to a locket that's sealing apart two personalities."

The boy had trapped the girl's self in the locket. "I see. You need to talk to the girl then?"

"Yeah, she'll agree more likely," the girl here said, turning from looking about the judgment hall in interest.

"Got it." An idea of how this should work formed in his mind. Switching immediately at the save point should work best, as he did not want these innocents to face the consequences of what he'd done just now.

"How's it going with getting them to talk?" Sans asked.

They had a bit more time to work with. "This is the eighth run and I got one crazy story out of the boy on the seventh," Sans told them. "Since I got this, I'll take a few times working to get something out of her too."

"Well don't have too much fun with that device; we had to work fast and that might break the seal if they get switched too much."

"I'll do what I can," he said, knowing he couldn't promise to be careful. His mirror self gave a small nod of understanding.

Crack

One second, she'd been getting that locket on in front of a mirror. The next second, she was here standing in a grand golden hall full of sunlight, one that made her feel like someone was close by watching her. Judging her. "What the hell?" Chara asked.

"Hello," a younger girl said in the middle of the hall. She was in an old-fashioned dress with red hair ribbons, hanging onto a weird spider doll. Her backpack had a patch for the Ebott Elementary School. "It's been a while, huh?"

"Long enough that I don't know who you are," she replied.

"I'm Frisk. Remember me, Chara?" She smiled. "We were gonna make a weird name club."

"Oh, you." She remembered something Chara had said, about taking advantage of naive faith. Like with the dino kid. "But what are you doing here? Where are we anyhow?"

"We're in the castle of the king of monsters," Frisk said. "In the judgment hall, so I guess it's like a courtroom."

"Oh god, did he take over again?" She'd have to punish him in some manner. But how? He was a ghost and she didn't know much about ghosts.

"No, he sealed you in his locket when you put it on," she said. "The other Chara, I mean."

"I thought we were partners… that goddamn jerk!" Chara grabbed the locket with the intent of snapping it right off. But it thumped in her hand and only hurt the back of her neck when she yanked at it.

"I don't think you can take that off," Frisk said. How did that brat know so much? Although Chara was too angry to think long on that. "But I have an idea for you."

She glared at her. "Oh yeah? What can you do? You're just a first grade squirt."

"We can trade," she said, clutching her spider doll to her chest but being as brave as she could. "See, um, Chara and Asriel, they're like a coin that was flipped a while back. You got most of Chara when you got picked to come here, and I got most of Asriel when I got picked to come here, but we kind of got picked at once because Chara and Asriel are together. I have a bit of Chara and you have a bit of Asriel. But we can trade things so that you have all of Chara's soul and I have all of Asriel's soul."

That made her pause. Chara was a jerk, but Asriel was a whiner and whiners were worse than jerks. If it hadn't been for Asriel, she would've beat Mettaton far sooner than she had, with much less of a headache. And in spite of getting angry at him and berating him all the time, Chara had a weird fixation on his adopted brother. Making fun of his cuteness hadn't been a good revenge after all. But getting rid of his idiot brother?

"Sounds good to me," she said. "But how do we go about trading pieces of souls?"

Frisk smiled and held a hand out to her. "Good, I just need your agreement."

Then the light in the room turned blinding, filling her vision with white and an afterimage of Frisk. A thought of strange hearts came into her mind, one red and one gray but each tinged with a bit of each other. In swirls and sparkles, the colors blurred, sharpened, then separated into two wholes. The red heart went right to Chara's locket while the gray heart went into Frisk's red soul.

When her vision cleared, the girl was gone. "I hope that worked," she said.

"Don't worry, it did," someone said. She looked back and where there hadn't been anyone before, there was that squat skeleton from way back in Snowdin. Right, she'd never run across him again after crushing the other.

"Good, I won't have to deal with that little whiner anymore," Chara said, satisfied with that. "And who are you again?"

"Sans." He pulled a hand out of his jacket and touched where his nose would be if he hadn't been a skeleton. "And going back to an earlier question you had, yes, this is the judgment hall."

"So what, you a judge or something?" That was unbelievable, given the carefree way he'd acted back then.

"Precisely," Sans said, in a tone unlike anything since his weird warning before. But he shifted back to say, "You don't seem very aware of what that means, which I understand, you being from the surface and all. Do you know what the acronym LOVE means?"

"I've heard about it, something about measuring strength," Chara said. Chara had mentioned the term from time to time, not caring to explain. And she didn't really care to hear the explanation. Yet, she had a feeling that this monster was more than he seemed; getting him chatty seemed like a good idea to clear an opening for attack.

He shook his head. "Not quite. It stands for Level of Violence. It measures your capacity to hurt others. The higher your LOVE, the more distance you can put between yourself and others. This detachment makes it easier for you to hurt them and not be hurt in return. Now, what kind of LOVE is normal in a person?"

"How the hell should I know?" she asked. "It's not like you can check a status screen for real people."

Somehow, he seemed amused at that. "True, most people can't tell. I can tell. For most folks, 1 to 3 is normal. LOVE can go up, but it can also come down under the right circumstances. 5 is where you start keeping an eye on a person, see if you can figure out what they're up to. Although, I've seen it that people can get up to 6 without killing anyone if they are violent enough on a regular basis. What kind of LOVE do you have?"

"Don't know," she said, figuring that 8 or 9 would make sense. It'd jump higher when she got around to killing humans instead of just monsters.

"19," Sans said. "But you know, I considered you unforgivable the moment you killed my brother."

CRACK

There was a lot to review this time. However, there was also a strong image in his mind that lingered in spite of the time skipping. A young girl, who was his friend in spite of only being with him for a few minutes, had hugged him and wished him luck, not knowing what exactly he was facing. And that pulled on a memory that he hadn't experienced at all, since it belonged to the Sans on the other side of this coin. A ray of warm sunlight welcoming one home, forgiving.

That was the girl who should be truth.

Even if it wasn't his own memory, he felt strength from it. As long as it stayed around, he felt he wouldn't lose sight of his purpose here even if all the resets ended up blurring his thoughts. And his purpose was to make himself false by giving this hollow-hearted pair hell. It didn't scare him much, since the longer this went, the more likely that his true self could live with that sunlight. But there was still more to do.

When he had himself set, the boy walked into the room, apprehensive. Then time was yanked around and the girl was there in shock. As Sans made a note about the seal, she got angry. "That was a hell of a cheap shot, you bastard!"

He had explained to her about LOVE. "I did tell you I was a judge, didn't I? At least, that's what your reaction tells me."

"What the heck?" She took a couple steps forward, looking for him.

"We detected an anomaly that was skipping wildly across timelines," he said. "Moments would splinter apart, most ending a brief time later. If you were using that kind of power to fix problems, well that's reckless but trying to do good. But no, you have been using that power to kill everyone in your path. Why?"

Fortunately, she wasn't as tight-lipped as her partner in crime. "Because I could. I don't care how you phrase it, growing detached or whatever, cause I know I'm more powerful than before. It doesn't matter how idiotic people are because I'm no longer the powerless trying-to-be-normal girl who has to act good because all the idiots insist on it."

"You don't like to be powerless, huh?" Sans had heard this kind of talk before from other high LOVE persons. It really didn't fit with a person her age, at least until you considered her status as a hollow heart. When you got people like that who could never know empathy, once they got a taste for killing, their LOVE would increase rapidly.

"Course not," she replied, still looking for him. "I've always been ordered about and lectured because I was a small kid, or bullied and singled out cause my parents are rich idiots and the others are all jealous for stupid reasons; they'd hate to be in my position as much as I do, I'd gladly trade that away. Everybody forcing me to do this, or do that, and punishing me for trying to do what I wanted, well I don't have to put up with that anymore!"

"What about how your tagalong sealed you away in a locket for a few minutes?" he asked.

"He is going to suffer so much when he tries to come back. He can stay in the locket for now." And she'd seen him, too far to attack with the knife she had. So she threw the Knife Storm spell, which was easy to dodge once one knew the trick to it. "And you can just go away, I don't need to deal with some judge like you."

"Hey now," Sans said, acting like this was no big deal. "You should really chill out. It's a nice day, isn't it? The flowers are blooming, the birds are singing. On a day like this, kids like you should be burning in hell."

CRACK

According to his reference, she had caught on well before he did, but the initial barrage was causing her problems too.

Never end never end never end

That really worked, I can't see them anymore.

Happy about that, Frisk had told the others that the plan was a success and she was ready to go face Asgore. Most of her friends were going back to the castle gate, to wait for when they got there. But Sans somehow turned a doorway in the basement labs into a doorway straight into the area where the royal family had lived. To her surprise, it looked very much like Toriel's house in the Ruins. But instead of being clean and bright, this place was dusty with a few well-worn paths that someone took.

There was also something else different, something she felt but wasn't sure how to explain it. "There's something kind of sad about this place, but I don't know why," she told Sans.

"You're right about that," he said. "Is Asriel doing okay?"

That could be why, Frisk thought, he was nervous. "Did you want to do something here?" she asked him. "You can talk through me if you want."

"Mom wouldn't be happy with all this dust," Asriel said, drawing her eyes towards the hall where the bedrooms were. "Um, c-could I go look for something in my room? At least, it might be there."

"I don't think we'll get in trouble for that," Sans said. "It is your house."

"Okay, where do I go?" Frisk asked.

It was the same bedroom that Toriel had given her too, almost the same except there were two beds here. There were also a group of pictures on the bookshelf in back. Over there, they found a pair of dusty old lockets. They were both on gold chains, with a white heart on them. Opening up one, Frisk found old portraits of Asriel and Chara inside that said 'Best Friends Forever'. Asriel looked happy in this portrait, while Chara was smiling but didn't seem enthusiastic about having his picture taken. He had black hair and brown eyes, seemingly normal.

"He doesn't seem like a nice friend to me," Frisk said, remembering yesterday.

"He wasn't always so mean," Asriel said. "He liked jokes and making funny faces, though he didn't like being caught on camera. I, um, I want to keep this, though I can't really wear it."

She thought for a moment about wearing it herself, but then remembered the story about how Chara thought nearly choking someone was a joke. Someone like that really wasn't a good friend. "I'll put it in my bag for now," she said. Maybe once she showed him what good friends were like, he'd change his mind about keeping the locket.

After getting that, Asriel was quiet in thought. Frisk and Sans headed further into the castle, eventually reaching the big golden judgment hall. Since they didn't have to worry about facing off with a violent person this time, Frisk ran ahead, making her steps fall extra hard so they echoed noisily in the room. It made it sound like someone much bigger was running through, like Undyne in her black armor.

It made her laugh and twirl around. "This place is so cool!"

Sans chuckled. "Glad you think so, kid."

"Well I know we're just in caves and stuff, but it looks like you could go right outside here." She paused in front of one of the large windows; the delta rune that Toriel said was an important old symbol to monsters was on there. "And Snowdin was so pretty having Christmas time forever, and Waterfall has the star rooms and marshes. Lots of other great places too. Monsters made this place really cool, huh? But I think you could do a lot better once you get outside and have a lot more to work with."

"Sure, that's what a lot of us are looking forward to," he said. "Hey, but if things were different and we weren't sure if you could get through the barrier, would you have wanted to live down here with us?"

"That would be a lot of fun," Frisk said, but there was a thought she couldn't dismiss. "But I don't think I could. I mean, my family's not here. If they were here, then maybe that could work out. Even as great as this place is, I just couldn't not live with them."

"I can understand that. I mean, if I got a chance to go live on the surface but I had to leave my family behind, I wouldn't do it. Just not worth it."

The monsters who had come in before had said the king was in the garden yesterday and Sans seemed to think he'd be there again today. That was why they were passing through the judgment hall, to get to a staircase that led up to where larger holes in the mountainside let plants grow better. But at the door to the staircase, Frisk felt a tingle of magic that didn't bother her, but acted like a wall to her friend. "Sans?"

"Hmm," he touched the barrier, causing a ripple to spread out from his fingertip. "He blocked off access to the gardens for other monsters. And I only made one of the seal switcher, huh. We could wait, but who knows how long it'll be until he comes back down."

"Could we yell for him?" Although if her making a racket in the judgment hall hadn't gotten his attention, maybe not.

Sans rubbed his chin. "Dunno. Actually... how about you go up there yourself?"

"Is that gonna be okay?" she asked. "I mean, Undyne and Toriel said that they wanted to talk to him before I met him, or at least when I did." He was a king, so maybe certain manners were expected. Unfortunately, Asriel was still quiet.

"I know," he said. "The thing is, kid, Asgore can be stubborn, but you hold a powerful love in your heart. I think that will speak to him more clearly than anything else. Besides, I believe in you." He winked at her. "Just be yourself and no matter what happens, I'm sure you'll be fine."

She smiled at that. "Okay! I'll be back down with him soon." Then she turned and started up the long staircase.

So that's the judge's judgment on her. He didn't even explain the important stuff so she knew what he was doing. And it's totally wrong! She so naive, too good for her own good. But, she does really have Asriel with her. He can remember some things when we're close. Hmm...

never end never end never end