There was a moment where the world shifted around them, and the dizziness hit her in a wave but this time she remained standing and it passed quickly and without incident. The heat here was worse than before, but there was a strange hum in the air that caught her by surprise. It raised the little hairs on her arms and drew her gaze.

Sitting in the middle of a field of lava squatted a behemoth machine its sides painted with shifting reds, oranges, and black almost making it look like it was breathing. A living being pulsating in the heart of the Underground. Alanna distractedly dropped Cooper's hand as she moved forward ignoring the skin blistering heat that being near the lava brought. The hum of the thing increased when she moved closer and she swore she could hear melodies old and forgotten in the noise. It gave her a sense of foreboding and she remembered, as if through a half-forgotten dream, an image of Sans holding a white lab jacket, like the one that Alphys wore, his eye flashing violently blue as he let it sail down toward the base of the monstrosity. The lava swallowed it too quickly and he turned away his fist clenched.

Static swept through her and she remembered Gaster with a syringe filled with a deep throbbing red substance being shoved into bone. The feeling of his body melting around him but the will to keep going roaring through his head. She felt the ledge before he did. As he fell she watched as he began to split apart and by the time he would have reached the bottom of the machine he was gone. Split a trillion ways with no hope of becoming what he was ever again.

Alanna swayed with the influx of information while the behemoth machine sat quietly watching. A faint fleeting feeling shivered across her soul and a great sense of loss and pain swept through Alanna leaving her shivering despite the heat.

"What is that?" She asked her voice sounding far away. She forced herself to look away from the machine only to see Cooper staring at it. His expression was faintly disturbed.

"The Core," Cooper's eye brightened and she immediately tensed. "My nightmare away from home." He moved closer to her and the Core, but Alanna grit her teeth hating that her first reaction was fear. Would she ever stop being afraid down here? "Care to explore it with me?"

Explore it? Alanna turned back to look at it again. Some deep instinctual part of her wanted nothing to do with the place. Maybe it was the strange humming...or even the lava...but she found herself shying back.

"Your nightmare away from home." She echoed looking back to his mostly skeleton face. "Where's home for you? Why is it a nightmare?" She kept the Core in her peripherals, not willing to let it truly leave her sight. It felt like some wild animal. One you had to monitor constantly or be in danger of it snapping at you.

"My home is a timeline a ways off." He said letting his gaze travel the place for a moment. She had a vague understanding of what he meant by timelines. Something to do with parallel universes or something like that. It still felt farfetched. "As for the Core, in my timeline, I spent a lot of my early childhood there." His hand twitched slightly at his side and Alanna frowned. "We'll leave it at that. Overall it is an interesting and marvelous scientific structure."

"Yeah it looks," Alanna trailed off for a moment, "imposing." She finally said. "I can explore it with you." Something within her balked at the thought of entering the great machine. But Cooper had brought her here for a reason, and she needed to know what it was. Plus she could ask him as many questions as she wanted. "How do you travel between the timelines?"

Cooper raised his hand and instead of the normal green spark she had come to associate with his power new energy surged around and through it. It was differently colored than his usual magic, almost like it was threaded through with darkness.

"I open holes into a space in-between the timelines and travel through them." For a moment she remembered the darkness. Darker than dark, and then darker. He closed his fist cutting the flow of energy. "That is the simple version." His hand dropped completely and his gaze moved from the Core and landed on Alanna. "Follow me." He began walking further down the packed dirt path expecting her to follow.

Alanna slowly trailed after him keeping an eye on the Core. "So...what does the Core do?" She asked moving slightly faster so that she could catch up with him. "It has to do something."

"It's the power source of the underground. A massive interchangeable machine that continually pumps out energy."

"That explains the hum." Alanna mumbled to herself. The further they walked the more the path slowly curved toward the hulking beast of a machine. She found herself slowing and looking at it more. It was all twisting metal and pipes twirling in and out of themselves like some sort of macabare dance caught mid-step. At the bottom there were two elevators that poked out looking slightly like emancipated legs. Alanna wondered how much magic was used in the machine's creation. Breathing was getting harder the closer they moved to it, she could feel that hum invading her body running underneath her skin and pricking at her soul. Alanna hadn't realized she had slowed to a stop a few feet behind Cooper. She was instead focusing on how she felt as if her magic were about to release from her in a catastrophic wave. She wanted to run.

It was like some part of her, or something outside of her, was warning her of this place. She knew without a doubt that something bad had happened here...that something bad was yet to come. Her breathing had picked up and she found herself clutching the pendant shifting into more of a fighting stance.

"Bubbles." His voice was so very far away. Her heart had begun to jackhammer in her chest. Still she forced herself to look to Cooper who had stopped walking and was glancing back at her. "You okay?"

"Fine." She ground out forcing herself to move step by step to him. Her breathing was erratic. It felt like someone had injected her with a dose of adrenaline. Still she moved herself closer. "I'm okay, let's keep going."

There was no way some stupid machine was going to keep her from getting answers about the most mysterious inhabitant of the underground. Well...one of them at least.

"Is that all the questions you have?" He asked walking ahead of her.

"No." Alanna said following him into one of the elevators. "How did you figure out that you could use those powers? And why do you hunt anomalies?" She asked as the doors slid closed.

"I was made with this power and I was created to destroy." His voice was deadpan. He never moved, never even looked toward her as he said it. When the doors opened he walked out his face completely expressionless. Alanna paused inside the elevator eyes wide.

"Cooper," she hurried to him. "What do you mean you were made to destroy?" She reached out and caught his arm trying to get him to slow down or something. It looked like he was trying to hide something. What it was, Alanna had no clue.

"What?" Cooper turned back emotion leaking back into his face. "Something spook you?"

Alanna frowned slightly at the distracted look in Cooper's eyes. "Nothing." She mumbled glancing around herself. It was futuristic looking all right. Blue metal walls dotted with red lights. The hum was everywhere in here, but strangely the more she felt it the less it seemed to scare her. Whatever feelings she had walking up to the machine had faded as she reached the interior. "This is amazing." She told Cooper quietly.

He looked around. "It truly is an engineering wonder."

Alanna smiled slightly at the slight awe in his tone. "So you like science then?" She asked slowly walking down the hallway reaching out to let her fingers trail over the buzzing walls. "You seemed really interested in what Alphys was doing and now this."

Cooper began walking again slowly showing her the Core. "Science to me is both a blessing and a curse." Something akin to a painful memory seemed to flash across his face. "When used by someone like Alphys it is a helpful tool that makes the lives of monsters easier."

"Yeah, I get it. Don't want any mad scientists running about doing who knows what." Alanna paused near a series of neon colored tubes reaching out and tapping a nail slightly against them. The floor underneath them she noticed was etched.

"Alanna I have a question for you." Cooper stopped suddenly looking rather seriously at her. She stopped finger still pressed lightly against a tube.

"Yes?"

"Besides the flower, have you come into contact with any other strange or disturbing monsters?" Alanna knew that her face went pale. She took a small step back wanting to put distance between the two of them. Gaster had been a secret for almost as long as she had been in the underground. No one but Frisk had suspected but never pushed the subject.

"Why?" The word slipped out before she could think.

His eyes sparked. "Just answer the question. Who else have you met?"