When I regain my senses, I push him off of me, righting my scarf unnecessarily. He smiles a little and I exit the lab. I follow the thin path and step onto some piping. Efficient, I guess, to use a material transferring device as a walkway. I walk along it until I get to a conveyor belt. I step on it and it moves so quickly that I'm almost thrown off. I barely keep my balance on the odd and unnecessary turns and it throws me off on the end. Ow.

I walk along a second section of piping and find a diamond. I touch it and it shatters, cooling me down in this hot environment and dropping a pair of sunglasses on my head. I put them on and take a picture with the most stoic face I could muster. I send it to Sans with the caption Cool x2. I get back the emoji version of Sans's sleeping face. Didn't even know that was possible.

I put my phone away again and I look down the path. Hot steam vents. Damn it. On the bright side, they easily had force of pressure to push me across the gap in front of me. I sigh and jump across. But I don't land on my feet. I land on my face. It's after a few vents that I finally learn how to balance. Then they start switching directions on me. It's a real pain to figure out my way through, though I manage to find more ammunition for my weapon. Alphys is helping without helping.

After that madness, I make it to another section of piping. It has lazers moving across it at about the height of my midsection. I shoot them with my paintballs, making them overload and explode in a cinematic manner. It was great. The moving ones stopped and shook before they exploded. Thank the gods of cool for these sunglasses.

I make my way onwards to a fork in the road. I head straight, only to find the door locked. Perfect. I have a feeling that this is a puzzle of some kind. I go back to the fork and hang a left, going into that door. It's a giant screen with Mettaton's face and some text that says "Smile! You're on camera!" on it with a podium in front of it. When I touch the podium, the panel slides open and a kind of game controller rises from it. It has a joystick on the left, a big button with the word "fire" on it and two buttons on the right labeled "A" and "B". The screen changes to a bunch of black and white boxes. On the bottom of the screen are two spears that look a lot like Undyne's and on the top is what looks like a target. I move the joy stick and the selector moves from box to box. Alright, this should be easy enough: get a spear in the target.

It doesn't take long. I broke a box on accident and it cleared the way for the second spear. Next!

I go to the room to the left of the locked door and find a lazer blocking my way. I shoot it and it explodes like all the other ones. I always liked pyrotechnics. This puzzle is different yet the same. More boxes, two shots and It looks like I have to put the picture back together. There's also a timer off to the side, slowly counting down. Something tells me that I really wouldn't like it if it gets to zero. The pressure is on! The timer has slid down to ten seconds before I finish the picture. The boxes then turn over and turn into a target, which I waste no time shooting the spears into.

I wipe my brow. That was a close one.

I go to leave the room and there's C4 stuck to the door. It beeps and explodes, throwing me backwards into the podium. I swear I hear something snap but I can't allow myself to panic. I get my legs under me, by back throbbing. Then my phone rings. I pull it out of my bra and answer it.

"Get your ass up!" Papyrus's gruff voice says.

I scoff into the receiver and slowly make my way to my feet, using the podium to lean on. What the hell does it look like I'm doing?

"If you die, we're going to have problems." he growls.

"Che!" I half laugh. No fucking kidding.

"Good, now get moving! You have a long way to go." he growls and hangs up.

I roll my eyes and hobble towards the door. My ears are still ringing. I honestly don't know how I survived that.

I go through the center door, over some steam vents, and I find myself in a dark room. I grope the wall to my left and I find a light switch. I flick it on and before me is a room that looks like it doubles as a torture chamber and a kitchen. There are cameras everywhere. Then Mettaton rises from the floor, game show music and confetti polluting the air.

"Welcome, my fabulous fans to another episode of Cooking with Mettaton!" he says in his monotone voice,a recording of an audience clapping playing. "Today, we are going to make Roast Human!"

Suddenly several little somethings push me forward and start crawling on my back. Several of them jump in front of me and start dragging me towards a stone table covered in blood. They're tiny versions of Mettaton! I fight it as best I can and a feeling of dread settles in my stomach as we inch closer to it.

"First, prepare your seasonings!" he says and lists off a bunch of different spices and vegetables as the tiny robots strap me to the table.

"Next, you'll want to preheat your oven to 218*C or 148*C if you want to slow cook your human." he says and rolls over to the part of the counter that has a baking dish and stuff like tin foil. He begins to tell them how to prepare the baking dish of their choice as what looks like several giant metal meat tenderizers on a wheel lowers from the darkness of the ceiling. My eyes widen to the size of saucers. I pull at my restraints harder.

The closer it gets, the tighter my restraints feel. Oh, this is gonna get hurt. I pull on my thumbs with all of my might.

"The next thing you do is prep your human! I personally like my human nice and tender." he says and the wheel starts spinning, faster and faster, like a sawblade. I snap the tendons in my thumbs and pull the joint out of their sockets.

Fuck that hurts!

I slip my hands free and throw myself forward as the hammers come down, grinding the stone table into rubble. Getting my feet free is much harder now, but my life is worth a little pain. I roll away from the table as the wheel loses a pulley and goes out of control. It tears up the kitchen and the torture chamber. As Mettaton and his stage hands are freaking out and going after the death wheel, I exit stage left.

I slam the door behind me and kneel down to rest for a minute. I see a diamond several feet in front of me. I sigh in relief and quickly set my thumbs back where they go. Hurts more going back in than they did going out. I stand up and touch the diamond. It shatters and the pain in my hands is completely gone.

At the end of the path is an elevator. I raise my weapon as I press the call button. It dings open and, thankfully its open. I peek in and around the sides. No one hiding. I press the up button and it takes me to the next floor. Weapon still raised, I wait for the doors to slide open.

Ding!

two feet in front of the door is another C4 bomb. I quickly hit the the close-door button and it starts beeping. I throw myself into the side of the elevator and the doors actually start to close. It explodes before the door closes all the way and the fire burns up all the oxygen in the elevator. I cough as I try to get the doors to open again. I stumble out, lungs screaming for air. My throat is burning. I slowly make my way out of the cloudy smoke and over to Sans where he's selling hotdogs. His starting price is 50g. No way I have that much. I don't even know where my money went when my midsection had a hole in it.

'Hotdog, please.' I says, trying to get my breath back.

"50g, doll." he says with a smug grin.

I bend down to his eye level and get as close as I can without him missing my signs. 'What can I do to convince you to lower the price?' I ask, the most suggestive look on my face. I even caress his bony cheek. His face flares a deep red and his eyes turn to hearts. He's at a loss for words, sputtering and stuttering. He hands me a hotdog, nothing intelligible coming out of his mouth. I take a bite slowly as he watches, the hotdog tingling on my tongue. I finish the hotdog and saunter away, a smile on my face. I've never actually been able to pull that off before.