I just realized that the subtle hints of Charisk are intensifying. Great. Absolutely great!

Chapter 22: Land of Heat and Clockwork

"Are you okay?" Alphys was the first to ask. I felt fine, other than a few electricity burns I showed Alphys, who applied a sort of cream to them. The cream was very cooling, and I felt the burns fade away.

"That...um...wasn't really supposed to happen." Alphys chuckled. "I thought he was much farther away than what I guessed."

"That...was amazing." Chara laughed. "Aside from the electrical burns you got, but that was amazing!" She showed me a recording on my phone of the entire happening that had just occurred. It was exactly as ridiculous as I thought it would turn out to be. I took the phone back after about ten seconds of it, already pretty unimpressed with how ridiculous everything turned out. Too much.

"A-anyways, Frisk…" Alphys interrupted, after I had reobtained my phone. "You see your Google Drive app? Well...now you can store items in it as well. It's hooked up to the boxes. Just give it a few moments to scan whatever you're putting inside your phone."

I nodded. Chara brought out our stuff as I scanned it all in.

"I also took the liberty of putting an inhaler inside of it, in case you ever feel a shortness of breath. Take a puff and you'll feel better, I promise." Alphys said. "I'll be contacting you through your phone as you go across Hotland and the Core. It's, um...pretty dangerous."

We said our goodbyes to Alphys as we walked on through her lab, towards the Core. On our way out, I checked the hole Mettaton left. The space was only a few inches. He must have slid his way through perfectly.

Monsters are weird.

Alphys was anything but helpful. Apparently she intergrated my Facebook with Undernet, some sort of monster social networking site, and took the liberty to add a couple of friends I knew to the 'friends' list, including herself. It certainly didn't help when once every few seconds, Alphys posted something like "Check out this cool anime!" or "Wow, this sucks."

On another note, Hotland was pretty, well, hot. I was sweating in a very short amount of time along with Chara, and as we switched from long-sleeved shirts to short-sleeved, and finally from short-sleeved to sleeveless, I got to see the full extent of both Chara's scars, and the amount of atrophy and color I lost in my skin.

Chara's scars dotted all over her arms. They ranged from small blister scars to larger scars from what appeared to be an assortment of everything from knives to stones. I didn't press. On another note, Chara was pretty lean for her slim form, just like mine. Her skin color was quite pale, however. Alarmingly pale, like she'd spent a year or two without sunlight.

If only I could be as well-toned as her, especially after a week out. When I fell, my skin was just beginning to bronze due to my Chinese ethnicity and the time I spent out in the sun. My arms weren't exactly noodles, but they weren't very tough, either.

Now, my arms were growing quite shockingly pale. My arms were very skinny as well, and I had the physical fatigue to back it up already. I hadn't even walked half a mile yet and already I was gasping for air. I fished around in my phone's new storage for the inhaler, and took the first of what was marked as "five thousand guaranteed uses of custom mixed." It had an aftertaste like Toriel's pie and gave me a fresh breath of air. Amazing.

"You okay, Frisk?" Chara asked. She leaned over me.

"I'm fine." I answered. I straightened back up.

Luckily for me, a good portion of the journey ahead was conveniently placed conveyor belts, quick and so smooth that all a person had to do was just lie down, and stare at the ceiling.

I finally took this time to close my eyes and take in the feeling of my surroundings. Sure, the magma below us was hot, because it was called HOTland for a reason. From this I deduced that I was actually pretty close to the Earth's core.

But in another aspect, everything felt amazing. The magma rose and fell, brightening the world and then darkening it. Like the Earth breathed. It's heart and breath pulsed according to the magma.

And so did everything with it. Gears clanked to the life-giving rhythm of the Earth. Steam whooshed when the Earth exhaled. The conveyor belt even followed this natural life force of what the Middle Ages could only describe as "the very pulse of Gaea." If, you know, they could dig deep enough to see this.

I saw a few other monsters milling about: some burning coils of rope that made me cough and sputter, which attracted over weird volcano monsters that tried to heal me with lava, which didn't work out very well, and some airplanes-looking monsters that took a wide berth around me whenever I got too close. Between all three of these, which, combined with the heat, made me dehydrated faster than standing in a desert, the amount of time I had to lie down and contemplate Hotland was actually rather small. But it was still great.

Fwoosh.

My latest lie-down time was rudely interrupted by a jet of steam lifting me up into the air, before promptly dropping me on a stone platform in front of a matrix of lasers, knocking the wind out of me, giving a little "oof." Luckily, I didn't hit my head. Chara hopped over the gap on the next jet of steam, laughing at my misery. Great.

"Hey, I found this." Chara tossed a stained apron at me. "It's better than that bandana you've been carrying around."

The apron smelled distinctly like home, or at least the perfect form of home. It smelled like a family I never had. I blinked a couple of times and got over it. Remember the cogs. Remember the apron. Remember the awe, the feeling of the rhythm of the Earth. I used my powers to make a SAVE.

And just then, my phone rang. The caller ID was "Doctor Alphys Altavia." I pushed "Accept."

"Oh hi, Alphys." I said.

"H-hey, uh...you see those lasers, right?" Alphys asked. "They, um...work like magical attacks. Blue lasers can't hit you if you don't move, and orange lasers can't hit you if you move. Got it?"

"Got it." I told Alphys.

I hung up and evaluated the situation. Then, I moved. I ducked through the first few lasers quite well. But a pair of moving blue lasers gave me a bit of trouble as I accidentally tripped one of them. An alarm went off as a gun turret popped out of the floor, firing three quick shots at the intruder, which so happened to be me. One bullet caught me in the shoulder, giving me a stinging magical injury. Chara, meanwhile, was powersliding, leaping, and Matrix-dodging her way through the lasers, crossing a seemingly impossible gap in the process, and landing with a good bit of gusto. Show-off.

I found a switch near where the gun popped up, which was marked as ON. I put the switch to OFF. The lasers shut down. However, my victory was short lived as I noticed a large stone door blocking my path. Alphys called me again.

"Oh, um...this door has two puzzles you need to solve in order to open it. Try the one on the left first, I'll get back to you!" Alphys squeaked. Then she hung up.

The method of getting there was again on those steam vents. I stood on top of one of the vents, and when the steam lifted me up, I landed gracefully on the floor. Or, at least, I tried. I almost nailed the landing, but my legs wobbled at the last second and I almost fell over, had Chara not caught me. The muscle atrophy would be very, very annoying.

"Do I have to carry you around, like the old days?" Chara asked. Again, I shot her a glance.

"Hey, it was just an offer." Chara replied to my glare.

There were a couple of monsters standing around the entrance, who looked like some weird love child between missing texture humanoids and crash test dummies. They were all chatting about Mettaton's recent show. Eugh. I still shuddered at how weird some questions were. Where did he even get the question about Fallout from?

The puzzle in question, however, was quite nice. It consisted of moving asteroids around with gravity so you could take a shot at the ship on the other side. I pretty much breezed through the puzzle. It honestly was quite odd how most monsters were even supposed to be stuck on this. I went over to the right side, this time much more prepared for the landing. This time, there was a different collection of monsters, trapped behind a blue laser. And then, Alphys called me again.

"Hey, um...you've already solved the first one, huh? That blue laser looks like it's blocking those monsters. Hold on."

On Alphys' end, there was a bit of keyboard clacking. When it finished, the blue laser turned off, and all the monsters ran off.

"I cut the power for the laser." Alphys said. "That should let you get to the puzzle...do you need my help?"

It turns out we didn't need her help as I breezed through just about the same "shoot-the-other-spaceship puzzle." Also pretty simple. I poked my head out of the puzzle room as I heard a loud grating noise, and the stone door slowly rumbled open with all the speed and noise of, well, a multi-ton stone door.

I stepped through the door, where there were many more steam vents. I jumped off the steam vents, allowing me to cross over to a very neatly tiled area, somehow with all of the lights off. I dialed Alphys on the phone, while Chara packed herself back up into my necklace.

"Alphys?" I asked.

"Uh...why are the lights off?" she asked.

"I don't know, I got here and the lights were off." I replied. "Can you turn them on?"

"H-hold on...I'm accessing the power grid, and…"

Click. The lights turned on, revealing a cooking show set. And, of course, Mettaton.

"Oh no." Both of us groaned.

"OH, YES." Mettaton beeped, right in my ear.