She needed answers. She needed to find Doctor Gaster. It was a little more personal than business, now. She was ready to tear her way to the top of the lab if she had to, but fortune answered the door—or elevator, rather.
She heard the metal doors open and a pair of heavily-armored feet scraping the tile. "Who's there?" a familiar voice cast into the halls.
As if they really have to fucking ask, she thought. She turned an eye up to the inconspicuous black globe in the corner of the hall, recognizing a prime spot for a camera. They'd likely been tracking her from the moment that magician recomposed himself.
Speak of the devil- "We'll go easy on ya, if you just come forward!"
She strode around the corner and came face-to-face with the magician and his cohort, one of the walking suits of armor. It hefted a mace and stood with its giant feet braced to block the open elevator.
"Oh, good," the magician sighed. "You gave us a real slip, lady! Now come here and... hey, hey!" He pedaled backwards on thin air, his levitation going haywire as he realized the succubus wasn't exactly stopping for them. "Stop, will ya?!"
She snarled, picked up speed, and charged right at the pair. The magician yelped and pointed a rod in her direction, pellets of hot magic shooting from the tip like bullets. She jumped to avoid the barrage and hurtled into a pounce, landing on the magician and driving them both to the ground.
The armored suit growled and swung its mace sidelong—and too slow. She ducked, and it smashed a piece of wall next to the elevator's keypad.
"Hey hey hey!" the magician beneath her yelped. "Watch the property damage, ya big-" The succubus planted her wrists, buried her claws in his robes and kicked him through the nearest door, losing his words to the shadows. She then clambered out of the way of the mace as the big guard wrenched it free of the wall, bits of stucco peppering the floor.
"Rrrrrrrrrgh!" the guard roared, lifting the mace again, and the upswing took so long that the succubus had time to deal an almost leisurely uppercut. Her claws tore through the face-plate and cinched the solitary glowing eye in the seat of the monster's helmet. She ripped it out with a rising shriek that drowned out the monster's gurgle of pain, and then it all exploded into black and grey.
The succubus staggered back, a touch shocked at how quickly it happened. The suit of armor and all the magic within had simply combusted, leaving scorch-marks and soot all over the floor and walls, and fine grains of ash between her fingers. Turned straight to dust.
A choking noise came from the magician's last direction. "Bruce? Bruce?! Oh sweet Christ-"
The succubus didn't linger. She took the card the armored monster dropped, threw herself into the elevator and mashed the inside panel until the door closed.
The lift began to rise, and she caught her breath under the soft white lights. A glance over found her thighs bruised and scratched from the bones, her clothes in ribbons from the vent shaft, her hands still bleeding from that broken cassette, and now an unhealthy coat of dust across her arms and chest. Some of the magician's magic had clipped her too, leaving a stinging mark on her flank and a hole burned through the webbing of her lower left wing.
Fuck, I'm a sight, she realized. Terrifying everyone in her way would only help carve a path to the doctor, though.
The door opened to the cleanly-lit halls of the regular lab. For a second, she was relieved to see nobody around, but then she turned a corner and there was another guard. Its stubby wings buzzed in a circle towards her movement, and an extra second was spent registering her appearance. "Excuse me, all techs are supposed to be on floor C for—oh my!"
Her gust of wind magic hit the monster like a fire hose, splattering its bug-like body against the wall so hard that it, too, shattered into dust. The succubus felt a tinge of compunction over how fucking fragile these people were, but didn't stop to dwell on it. She had three key cards now, and any combination should be enough to open any door she needed. The succubus combed through the floor, didn't find a trace of her target, and decided to hitch the elevator up to the next.
She had better luck the higher she went, it seemed. Sticking her head around a corner, she spied the tail of Doctor Gaster's unlucky assistant, slipping into an office. "Com'ere, bitch," she fumed, and raced up to the door. The second card she tried opened it.
Doctor Alphys was gathering a stack of papers from a desk into her arms, and didn't even look up as the intruder entered. "Um, yeah, I know, I'll be righ-"
Her glasses sailed off her nose and pinged against the ceiling, and her whole body flipped over the desk at the force of the kick to her underside. The room didn't even quit spinning before pins and needles sank into her sides, hoisted her by the coat and slammed her face-first into a broad, hard surface. The whole attack hit her like a gale, loose paper flurrying around the office in its wake.
"Ack! Ah...glrbl?" the drake babbled, dazed, and then drew a tight breath. The succubus held her throttled against the wall, the drake's feet paddling a foot off the ground.
Alphys chuckled haplessly once she realized what was happening. "I-Is this about last night? Eheh, heh..."
The succubus bared her fangs and kneed the drake in the crotch. There wasn't likely anything down there, but the sharp note of pain sucked through the drake's teeth was pretty satisfying. "No, but thanks for reminding me."
"Then w-w-what do you want?" Alphys squealed as she scrambled for air.
"Tell me a fucking story." The succubus emphasized her demand by flexing her claws over the drake's scales.
"Grk-! I-I'll tell you whatever you want, just don't kill me!"
She loosened her grip, but continued to hold the drake off the floor with a steely arm. "That's the spirit. What the fuck happened to that human kid?"
"W-W-What? Human? I don't know what you mean, I don't-"
The succubus roughly flipped the drake around to look her captor in the eye. "Think back, pickle cunt! The kid you kept downstairs, the one on those tapes."
"The t-tapes...?" The succubus could practically see something click in her mind, the drake's pupils shrinking to pinpricks. "Oh, god. Oh god, no, listen-"
As it happened, pleading did not temper the succubus's patience. She leaned into Alphys's face until the drake's eyes crossed, and darkly forced out, "WHAT. HAPPENED."
"Not here! They—I mean, he's not here anymore. I-It was forever ago, before even I was here, I wasn't even working here, you have to believe me-"
"Then tell me what you know."
"Ah...?!" Alphys squirmed as she gathered her panicked thoughts. "It was Doctor Gaster, he, ah—he wanted to protect him! From the king. The king's taking the souls of any humans that fall down here, but Doctor Gaster found him first. He was just a child, he thought it wasn't fair, he—h-he hid him in the basement, he-" The drake squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head feverishly. "-oh god please I shouldn't be saying this, I'll be in big trouble-"
"You're in big trouble right now!" the succubus blared. "If you don't want to answer to my claws, you'll keep talking."
Alphys gulped. "R-Right. The human, he—I don't know a lot about how he got here, honestly, I... he wanted to go back, I know that. He wanted to go back really badly, but it was, like, different...? It's like he didn't fall down here, like the other humans...? There was this machine, I don't know what it did, I don't have the schematics, somebody took them, it was so long ago...!" Her tone ramped up to sobbing the more she talked.
The succubus made her stop shaking by pressing the flabby flesh around the drake's neck harder into the wall. "Focus, you blubbery sack of tits."
A shrill, gasping noise emitted from her throat before Alphys continued. "R-Right, Doctor Gaster was going to help him, so he... h-he... they worked together on it, but something went wrong with the machine! It was an accident! It really was. It wasn't supposed to happen like that—nobody knew, nobody KNEW-"
"What fucking happened?"
"Doctor Gaster did the best he could. He saved him, I mean he tried, most of the magic grafts took, but part of the soul broke off a-and wouldn't s-s-tick. He had to work fast, or it'd go to waste. The bones in the crypt were human ones, so h-he thought they'd be compatible. The golem was th-the best they could do, and the rest—oh god, it took so much magic but Doctor Gaster, he saved him—I mean, them! He saved them both, he did!"
The succubus stared at her, torn between horror and rage. Alphys sniffled. "I-It's just..."
The drake drew a ragged breath and wilted into her coat.
"It's just they weren't... human... anymore."
She wanted to curse. She wanted to call them all bastards, liars, frauds. She wanted to say something. The succubus had never been short of expletives for any situation in her life.
She hadn't noticed she had released Alphys until she heard a soft thud as the drake hit the floor. Doctor Gaster's assistant looked up at her with a wide, frozen look, trembling too hard to make a move to escape. She wanted to slay this monster on the spot and spit on her corpse, but desecrating a pile of dust just wasn't the same.
Neither of them could say anything. It was all kind of pathetic. She stooped over the drake and watched her squeak and cringe in fear as the succubus swiped the assistant's key-card. She then walked out, and for good measure punched the keypad to the door clean off. It fell at her feet with a clatter of plastic and sparking copper wires, and the door slid closed, clipping short the drake's cry to, "W-Wait!"
The succubus might have kept her as a hostage, or pressed her for directions, but as she stormed away she recognized there was no chance the drake wouldn't set her up in a trap, so it was just as well. She was on her own. She was going to find Doctor Gaster, get back what he owed her, and make him pay—for everything.
She was outraged on several levels. For starters, that thunder-prick KNEW Papyrus was a golem, and had her try to read him, anyway. She had suspected it all along (and eventually confirmed it on her own), but not telling her right away was an incredibly dick move and a waste of her time. If Gaster knew Sans was the only readable one of the pair, he should have just told her to pick him. It was probably done on purpose to stall for time while they tampered with her crystal charm, trying to synthesize it—which made her duly mad at herself for falling for it.
I am a fucking idiot. For another thing, this just reinforced that Sans was, after all, NOT a golem, nor a monster. He was something else.
It's just...
'we came from the same person.'
...they weren't human...
'i'm already a skeleton, so... figure it can't hurt.'
...anymore.
Something worse. And she was determined to make the doctor answer for it.
The next monster she met was a... frog clad in leather pads and chainmail—okay fine, whatever. Since the amphibious monster was only as tall as her knees, she didn't have a problem punting it within an inch of its life.
"Where's Gaster?" she snarled as she held the frog up by the scruff of his cape.
The frog croaked up a bubble of magic that fizzled into vapor, his magic spent. "rrrrbbt—on the C deck. Big test today."
"Show me where."
The frog-monster's ghoulish features twisted into a mocking grin. "rrrbt—why should I?"
She rattled him inside his armor. "Because I'll fucking vaporize you!"
The frog attempted to blink (its eyelids were out of sync.) "Fine. But you'll never get close, you hag."
"We'll see," she spat, and carried the subdued monster to a service elevator. He guided her to another floor, and once the lift opened and she looked across the long antechamber to the heavy door at the opposite end, she saw what the frog meant.
Three more iron-clad brutes, four of those cricket-like monsters, two more magicians, six monsters she'd only describe as "a big walking devil-eye with horns" and ten of the frog's kin were guarding the door. The lot bared their weapons at her in union.
She would have been disappointed at any less. At least this security crew has its shit together.
"Drop the froggit!" one of the bugs demanded. She had considered slinging the battered monster back into the elevator and shuttling it away (she was going to spare it just for being cooperative, and she kind of liked its spunk), although crushing it in front of its allies just to defy them suddenly felt appealing.
She then thought about what the frog said (This little twat called me a hag) and hit upon a compromise. She set him down gently against the wall behind her. "I want you to watch this, gonad-sucker." She then turned to face the mob, braced her feet wide and cracked her knuckles. "Come and get him, cunt rags!"
The crickets traded looks with the magicians while the frogs filled the room with a warbling croak of outrage. Then the crew charged towards her at once.
Oh good, everyone's here to fight. If there was one language she didn't need em-reading to implicitly understand, it was violence.
And she was fucking fluent in it.
There was mere seconds before the stomping line of monsters reached her, and she wouldn't get a window of time like that again, so the very first thing she did was gather a funnel of wind magic and hurl it down the hall. It had the intended effect of catching the airborne crickets and turning them into dusty pancakes against the ceiling, with the bonus of throwing the levitating magicians off-balance.
Then their magic caught up to her. The way these monsters used offensive magic... Her instructors would call it qi-magic or 'mana energy,' and it's tangential to spirit magic, just on the material side of it. All their attacks were projectiles hewed from the same magi-corporeal substance as their own monster bodies. Magicians from her home-world, on the other hand, were trained to channel material magic from the planet, since it was a nigh-inexhaustible source, if more difficult to grasp and mold (her crystal charm was specifically crafted to help.) Monsters just used the magic innate to their own beings, so it flowed more easily and appeared more readily, yet would exhaust their mana much more quickly.
It was basically the magical equivalent of ripping off one's own arm and throwing it at the enemy, and it really freaked her out. A swarm of magic flies buffeted her face, and she tumbled forward to shake them off, her heels smashing onto the crown of another frog so hard that it disintegrated.
By the time she rolled onto her feet, three frogs surrounded her. One had picked up a spear dropped by the crickets and jabbed it at her chest, so she had to roll onto her other heel to dodge, grab it by the shaft and jerk it away. The frog holding the spear had a grip so sticky that she just picked him off the ground instead of disarming him, which was fine—she subsequently used his body to batter the other two frogs.
A magician appeared behind her, as she could tell by the hailstorm of magic bullets blistering her back. She flipped the spear in hand around and lunged backwards, driving it through the magician's robes. It was vanquished with a dusty poof.
The next six frogs were just stupid enough to throw themselves directly at her, and kicking them across the room almost became a game. She got lucky with one, sent it sailing into an eyeball-monster, and both collapsed at once. Before she could clear the floor of the swarming bastards, however, they suddenly gave her a wide berth. She glanced over her shoulder, saw the suit of armor looming overhead, and cursed.
The first fall of its mace nearly took both her wings off, so she decided to use them while she still had them. She kicked off a springy frog, grabbed the air and glided in a tight circle around the armor suit. It teetered trying to follow her, so all it took was a kick to the chest to knock it off balance and to the ground. In the shock of the impact she ripped off its helmet and squashed its magic eye, snuffing the monster out.
The other magician fell on her with a cry, its big gloved hands covering her face from behind, and she bellowed and thrashed to throw it off. It was a keen diversion, but the second she glimpsed the second armor suit rearing back to strike, she pivoted around, throwing the magician into the blow. The pile of robes turned to billowy dust under the armor suit's mace, and it roared in distress. She borrowed its moment of grief to kick the mace out of its hand and then shatter its face-place with her elbow.
The brute crumpled on the spot, and she vaulted over its falling form to slam both heels into the eyeball standing behind it. The creature evaporated under her weight so fast that it didn't fail to surprise her, and in the moment between a monster being there and a monster being dust she lost her footing and skid onto her hips. "Fuck!"
A spray of hot white magic scalded her arms as she held them up to shield her face, and she growled at the offending eyeball. Then the third mace drove into her side and knocked her across the room.
She heard one of her ribs crack, and an eyeball cackle, and she couldn't get to her feet without the whole room swaying. The armor suit took its time closing the distance, yet all she needed was to gulp down one breath to get her wits back. She spit a glob of blood on the floor and looked up in time to watch the mace streak down.
The succubus dropped and rolled, avoiding getting smashed by inches. She swept her leg around to knock the armor suit's feet out, but trying to move a ton of iron and steel plating with a kick turned out to be a dumb move. The suit lifted the mace for another strike and she took a dive between its legs, avoiding it and grabbing purchase on the monster's ridged backside. She scrambled up its body and sat on its shoulders. The monster twisted around and raised its free hand, reflexively trying to grab and throw her off. She clutched its gauntlet and simultaneously wrapped her thighs around the suit's thick head.
When the monster yanked her off its back, its head neatly popped off with her. She made sure to grab its magic eye in both hands and rip it in half.
The handful of monsters still standing watched the succubus appear from a cloud of ashen remains, turn towards them, rear onto four limbs like a large cat and spread her wings with a ferocious roar. They scattered, fleeing down the elevator.
"Chicken-fuckers!" she shrieked after them, sinking to her knees. "Run while you can. I am a FUCKING. DRAGON."
The hall looked like a grisly barbeque pit. She was bleeding. She felt dizzy.
Can't stop now. This shit's not finished yet.
She got up. The key-cards she took from the guards didn't work. The drake's card did.
She didn't know what to expect in the next room. An array of lab equipment shouldn't have surprised her, yet there was something uncanny that made her stop just inside the door.
Centered on the wide floor were four metal spires, each as tall as two men. They were fitted with coils emitting arcing electric sparks that formed a tent over a globe-like apparatus ringed with plated silver. Notches in the silver burned with unnatural light as the rings freely drifted around the globe. The whole device hummed with power that made her bones shake the way only magic could.
It looked like a gate—a real gate, a ring-gate—the very thing she used to travel to this world. For a moment she was too gob-smacked to move. Her very first encounter with the doctor trickled to the front of her mind.
'Can You Not Simply Build A Gate Yourself?'
'It's not that easy! I can't just... it's fucking complicated, okay? You need to use the right spells, and enchant all your materials, and you can only build one in certain places, where the lifestream is, uh... I don't know the fucking word. The point is that I can't even do it here, because there's some weird... field? Magic wall? It's shutting the planet's flow out.'
'That Would Be The Barrier.'
'Yeah, that huge, fuck-off, cock-block of a wall that's keeping me from leaving. How the fuck am I supposed to get through that?'
'You Are Not. That Is Rather The Point. However... We Might Be Able To Make A Deal.'
'What do you mean?'
'...Tell Me More, About These Gates.'
That Gaster and his crew were able to construct this homebrewed replica of an interstellar gate shrine from their own insulated understanding of magic and her... colorful testimony was nothing short of incredible, but without being built on a life-spring, she had to wonder what was powering it, exactly-
Then she saw it off to the side, hovering over a pedestal connected to the shrine: her crystal charm, emitting midnight-blue pulses. There was that dark power she found for him-
in a dusty bed, in a broken heart
-being used as fuel for the gate he promised to build.
Doctor Gaster was speaking. He stood with his back to her before the shrine, gesticulating grandly and pausing only to quietly say, "You Are Late." He then continued to address some crowd she had to look up to find. Next to the ceiling was a window-box, in which a dozen lab technicians peered down at the shrine over their instrument panels. They didn't seem to notice her, but were instead glued to the doctor's every word—or rather to the apple-sized, white-shelled orb hovering around Gaster's head. The orb was broadcasting some noise in tandem with the doctor's voice that she realized after a few headache-inducing seconds was a translation.
The conflicting sounds made it difficult to em-read him, and she wasn't terribly interested in what he was saying, anyway—some speech about "The Freedom All Monsters Deserve" and "The Stars Will Finally Open To Us" and "No Longer Will We Be Shackled To Mankind. We Will Become The Masters Of Our Own Destiny." It all sounded grand, really, if she could care.
...She had a master, once. Master Peacekeepers were the top of their breed, and she used to stare at them the way these techs did at the doctor—with that same glassy-eyed idolatry. It was a privilege and honor to be assigned to one, and she was very fortunate to work under Master Tair. He taught her many things about working in the field, and visiting the stars. "If you ever want to go home," he had said, "You need only draw a gate."
She had scoffed at the time and said you couldn't just draw a gate, and even if you could, she'd never want to go back. He called her cocky, and drew one, anyway—with stones and sticks and dragon bones, things kissed by nature. He taught her how to find a planet's hot-spots, where the lifestream gysered from the earth, and how to channel that energy using her crystal charm as a fulcrum. He taught her that all warriors are artists. He taught her how to really fight, how to really live-
And then he died, and the only thing she learned was that it was her fault.
When she looked at this gate shrine, she saw nothing of Tair's unique flair—the care and personality and art of it. It just looked sterile, like something found on an operating table. She supposed that was appropriate, given the builder. Something didn't feel complete, however, and after a moment she realized what was lacking: coordinate runes.
As soon as that thought struck her, Doctor Gaster waved his hand over the crystal charm and opened the gate. She had to shield her face against the explosion of light and implosion of sound as a gaping tear in magic, spirit and space swallowed the silver globe and blossomed within the shrine. When she braced herself and looked, she saw a well filled with stars, shimmering cold and impossibly deep.
If any of them had asked her—and they didn't, the stupid assholes—she could tell them exactly how dangerous it was to open a gate with no coordinates. Random coordinates were crazy enough (they were how she got here, after all), but opening a gate with NOTHING to guide the wormhole was basically signing a suicide pact with the universe. It was a fountain of untapped chaos that could send anyone literally anywhere in space-time: a barren asteroid field, the core of a sun, a swamp in the most remote reaches of the galaxy, or simply the worst kind of nowhere, crammed into a never-expiring rift between dimensions, left to simultaneously not exist and always exist.
But hell, she was an exotic magician, not an astro-physicist, so nobody asked her. She was actually impressed that a gate could be contained in this laboratory at all, much less the room-sized apparatus the monsters had built, here. The doctor really was a genius of sorts, if apparently insane. And now here it was: a gate to the stars, warbling in neatly-controlled entropy like a grandiose centerpiece.
It was hard to imagine that everything she'd experienced in the past couple of months was culminating at this point in time and space.
It was harder to imagine that without this gate and all the strings attached, she never would have paid a swear jar, or been punched by a fish lady, or learned about Santa Claus, or listened to a steady stream of awful jokes over a steady stream of worse food, or grappled a pile of bones with her own soul, or been thrown into a dungeon filled with human corpses, or slaughtered a score of people on her way to learn that all she knew about monsters, really, at the end of the day, was that they couldn't be trusted—and that they shouldn't trust her.
There was the exit. There was everything she wanted.
"Ah... It Is Truly Beautiful."
And there he was: Doctor Gaster, the root of all this terrible shit, trying as cold and clinically as possible to teach her with raw research that the most powerful emotion was sorrow.
Fuck that. I have a better answer.
"Hey, asshole."
Finally, one of her insults made him stop. He startled at her, and so did a hare up in the control room. Before he could summon anything with his fast-talking hands, her combat training jumped to the fore, and she grabbed his wrist and twisted his arm behind his back, earning a pronounced, "Gah!"
There was a swell of something black behind her mind's eye, and a kind of dark magic she could barely fathom began to boil beneath the doctor's mask. She got a fast impression that he was not just the boss around here because he was smart.
She snapped his wrist, breaking the bone, and with a clipped cry the magic fizzled out. "You-" he rasped, undertones of blind confusion marring his speech beyond her em-reading's range. "Yeah, don't fuckin' try it," she rebuffed.
What really got her was that he was surprised by all this—as if he never expected the murderous, raving dragon-lady to waltz through the lab and completely ruin his shit at the first sign of getting double-crossed. Perhaps he gave her too much credit for being a civilized, rational person. He was about to pay for it. She wanted to make sure he knew WHY he was being assaulted: for wasting her time, keeping her prisoner and making her feel like an idiot, just for starters. "That's for trying to fuck me over."
She yanked him around to face the gate. The un-coordinated portal breathed cold fire that tousled her hair and made the flaps of his coat slap her ankles, and its sound seemed to swallow all others in the room. She then leaned close to his ear (or whatever... hole he had that would pass for an ear), her knee braced against the hand locked tight against his back.
"And this is for Sans."
She kicked him into the gate. His body flew into the portal and then appeared to fold into the wormhole like a paper swan, sharp angles splitting and coalescing until the gate was satisfied with its meal and collapsed with a hard clap. His translator orb clattered to the floor, the silver rings stopped spinning and grew still, and the last trace of the doctor's existence on this planet (or perhaps this plane of reality altogether) vanished.
The succubus stamped her foot and crowed, "You know what else burns good cold? Revenge, bitch." She probably should have said that part first, before the kicking. Whatever. He still got the message.
There was a keening noise behind her that read on her em-spectrum between "no!" and "why?!" The succubus turned to watch Doctor Alphys stumble into the room. The little drake stopped and stared goggle-eyed at the scene, the papers she was holding tumbling out of her limp fingers. Her expression then melted into such pure shock and defeat that the succubus had no rejoinder (although she did notice the chipped glasses on the drake's snout with a twitch of humor.)
The succubus looked at her crystal charm, waiting patiently for her on the pedestal, and then directly at the drake. "Don't try and stop me."
The succubus grabbed the charm and fondled it between her fingers, appraising its condition. She was just happy to have it back at long last. It was still blue. Looks like it's got enough juice for one more jump, if I add my magic to it. She smiled wryly. ...Thanks, bonehead.
The succubus marched towards the idle shrine, working quickly. The lab staff and whatever guards were left weren't just going to sit and watch her escape, even though Alphys wasn't moving a muscle. She had a minute, maybe two.
It takes six runes to decently coordinate a gate, and eight if you're being really precise. In a pinch, you can get away with five, and she drew only as many symbols as she needed in a circle on the floor around the pillars, using her crystal charm as a sort of magic chalk. The runes glimmered ever-faintly with that dark power (she refused to call it sadness) and reflected in the polished silver around the central node.
She then stepped up to the pedestal and offered her charm to it once more. This next part's going to be a real trick, she thought.
"Doctor Alphys!" carried across the hall. She glanced through the open door and saw the monsters pouring out of the elevator. Some of them recoiled at the aftermath of the magical firefight and the remains of their comrades caking the floor and walls. Others focused on the drake, and started to run towards her, but then skidded to a halt once they spotted the succubus. They gathered uneasily behind the catatonic drake, their faces showing a heavy mixture of grief, outrage, confusion and fear. She would normally revile the smell of cowardice on the enemy, but with this crowd she just felt... tired. It was time to go.
She lit up the gate. The portal billowed open to full size, stirring the air around the room into a whirlwind that scattered the papers Alphys dropped and made the other monsters duck and cringe. The succubus breathed it all in—the wind, her favorite element—and tasted her freedom from all this dust and gloom.
"...w-wait."
She looked back. The drake was on her knees, pleading. It was the perfect opportunity to look down on her and tell her she deserved it... but in a strange way (just not pity, never pity), she understood. Everything here was ruined, now. This foreigner was going to leave behind nothing but failure and loss. The consequences of what she'd done today would probably ring across this little bubble of a world for years, and Doctor Alphys would have nothing good to show for it—all over one bad deal with a succubus.
She probably didn't deserve it. But there was no going back, now.
She closed her eyes and sighed. The pain in her ribs made her eyes sting. Or, maybe even…
She let her next thought fall on whoever would hear it. "This is why I don't get attached to my marks."
The succubus grabbed her charm, tore it away from the pedestal, and leapt into the gate.
A/N: Next is an epilogue, and then that's a wrap. Muchos thanks to all y'all for the feedback along the way.
