The Dreemurr kids had too many friends.
It wasn't that it was a bad problem to have. Frisk would have been amazed at the same time last year that it would be one of her biggest problems in life; the other two could never have imagined that it could be a problem for them at all. But it was, definitely, a problem when all they wanted was a small picnic. Sans wanted to come along, and there was no way the Dreemurrs would say no; Papyrus also found time to come, although Frisk still felt that Papyrus was best taken in small doses (and several judges agreed with her assessment). Victoria was manageable, especially since her father had time for her again, and she'd quickly grown accustomed to everyone in her class being able to do what she did. (Toriel had issued an ultimatum to the parents of the young children in her care: Either make their homes magic-ready or have their kids removed from her school. Having two different classes wasn't acceptable.) The Dreemurrs were outgrowing Kid and Kim, but if Victoria was coming along then there was no sense in not letting them come too. Undyne had somehow invited herself. Jack had finally managed to tamp down his exuberant use of magic, mostly because he'd almost killed himself three times overusing it. Inviting Nicole was extremely tricky because she tended to want to invite her other friends, who would invite their friends, and so on until half the school showed up to a small clearing off the bike path. And then there were all the acquaintances and generally nice people who wanted the Dreemurrs to call them their friends because they were still the royal family on top of everything else, and that was more or less the whole school. Frisk was very, very thankful that all the humans in her school had powers; it let them focus on themselves rather than on Frisk. She still wouldn't tell them the SAVE password to make the memory spell work, though. (Sans, Gaster, and Charles still didn't need it. They were too jammed into the fabric of existence. Of course Asriel didn't.)
There was enough food for all eleven of them, carried in backpacks and plastic lunch pails, most of it made by Toriel or human parents, some of it the kind of sticky, sugary slop that fueled magic users' desires and mildly annoyed Asriel, because even after almost a year, he was still the one cleaning the residue off his siblings' teeth every morning. A total of eleven people made frisbee tough to play, even though they'd brought three discs, and when Papyrus threw a humdinger that sailed over everyone's head, a long, white-furred neck stretched out to catch it. Make that a dozen of us. "WHO'S A GOOD DOGGIE? YES YOU ARE! YES YOU ARE!" Papyrus bubbled as the Lesser Dog, its neck retracting back to normal size with a loud, rubber-band snap, happily trotted the frisbee back, dropping it at Papyrus' feet before realizing that the frisbee-thrower was a large pile of delicious bones. "SANS! HELP! HE'S NOT FOLLOWING LEASH LAWS!" Papyrus yelled as he was unceremoniously dragged away by the tail-wagging Dog and the kids laughed themselves sick.
"I got him," Asriel said, flying over to block the Lesser Dog's path. "No! Bad dog! No biting lawyers!" The Dog whined loudly, making sad puppy-dog eyes with Papyrus' leg still between its jaws. "Well, okay, but not this one." Reluctantly, the Dog dropped a thankful Papyrus and trotted back towards the picnic, where they all petted it until its neck looped around the whole group and it started sniffing its own butt and chasing its own tail in a gigantic circle. Laughing, all the kids stroked the ouroboral Dog's fur, while Papyrus spun around trying to look the Dog in the face.
Frisk held one hand to the Dog and the other to one of Asriel's ears. "Hmm... it's about the same." He smiled faintly, and Charles chuckled. Mid-October had Asriel's winter coat growing in, and Frisk, still just human, had plenty of Dreemurr fur to wear, her light cotton skirt fluttering around her furry leggings and the usual red heart in the middle of her furry hoodie. Even the tops of her soft boots were lined with it.
Kid and Kim leapt onto the Dog's back, struggling to stay balanced as they rode around. "YOU GUYS SHOuld jump on too it's reaLLY FUN!" They did, Asriel's ears fluttering in the wind, but the weight of too many humans (and a tall skeleton) was too much for the Dog, who got tired and fell asleep, the kids reluctantly hopping off.
Frisk flopped down onto the blanket, and her brothers flopped next to her. She smiled, closing her eyes. With the Dog's expanded neck blocking the bite of the wind, it was easy to fall asleep. Her homework was done (including Gaster's and Dr. Home's homework), the blanket was soft on the crunchy leaves, and she could hear the other kids playing and Undyne scarfing down what was left of the food, leaving a few scraps for the Dog. It wasn't that Frisk felt contentment; it was that deep and abiding contentment was a part of Frisk's life. If it wasn't for what might happen to Asriel, she could use Gaster's techniques to regularly give it to the needy. In a way, Frisk missed having real problems of the people-screamy, universe-explodey variety. There hadn't been any more rampaging SOUL-stealers that she'd needed to deal with; although there had been at least three outbreaks, they'd been contained by Frisk's daily LOADs and various police forces. There had been a handful of people Darwinating themselves with their own magic, even on remembered days, but people had the right to make their own stupid decisions and they weren't her problem; she'd already tried to save their lives, as Charles occasionally reminded her. (They'd all received calls from rememberers saying "We found this mess on your floor that used to be you, so whatever you did, don't do it again." Sometimes, the mess was different the second time.) Other than having too many friends, anything that could be called a problem in her life was some brutally tough school-related thing, whether it was Mr. Reed's flatly merciless World History for World Leaders course, Undyne demanding exhausting feats of strength and stamina ("Go on, use magic, you little punks- IT WON'T MAKE IT EASIER!"), or Gaster's increasingly esoteric advanced course. She strongly suspected that Gaster didn't see the difference between middle/high school and college courses, and of course Dr. Home's tutoring really was almost completely college level, and more than once she wanted to scream that she was just eleven years old and couldn't possibly be expected to do any of this by any ordinary standard. But Frisk Dreemurr, Princess of Time and her brothers were not held to ordinary standards; they were expected to solve these things through effort and determination.
And no matter how hard any of it was, it was easy because they had each other, and they would always have each other.
Frisk heard something above her and opened her eyes, looking directly into the face of a grinning skeleton.
"Gaaaah!" she yelled, scuttling back into the Dog's fluffy neck and sitting up. Everyone else, even her brothers, laughed, and she shot a look at a smug Asriel for not warning her. "Sans! It's not Halloween yet!" Woken, the Dog's neck sssshhhhed against the grass and leaves like an overgrown snake as it retracted.
"well, I had to bone up on my skills."
"Go get two hundred and six different dogs to bury you," Frisk muttered. "Are you even getting a costume?"
"for a skeleton? that's sacral-edge." There were some days that Frisk really wished she wasn't taking Dr. Home's tutoring along with her brothers. It gave Sans all too many opportunities for horrible bone puns.
"Mom's making all three of us costumes," Asriel said. "But she's keeping them a secret."
"heh. tori..." Sans sounded vaguely wistful. "she's finally mastered the twenty-first century mom thing, huh. heh. her and king fluffybuns really do deserve each other." Frisk and Asriel had no idea what he was sad about, but Charles had been in enough minds to grasp the situation.
"Hey, don't worry about it, Sans," Charles said with a smirk. "Somewhere out there's a dead girl who won't resist your advances." He got an odd number of evil eyes. "What?"
"kid, you really are the devil."
"I really am the devil!" Charles shouted, cackling, his siblings' jaws wide in astonishment. It was wrong to laugh about this stuff, wasn't it? The idea that he would actually be wearing a personalized devil costume with full black armor and a seriously threatening visage, because he really was the Devil and had the body count to show for it, that wasn't funny, was it? And yet it was hilarious, and his mother adamantly insisted that he wear it, as she understood the concept of Halloween in a way that modern humanity did not. He had a genuine devil's pitchfork made of solid steel, similar in color to his father's trident, but he didn't look anywhere near as scary as his father that night; Toriel had very carefully and deliberately manipulated Asgore to look like Baphomet, and he waited upstairs, practicing his fierceness in the mirror. What had really scared everyone, though, was Charles simply disappearing for a few remembered afternoons over the past couple of weeks and adamantly refusing to answer questions about where he was and what he'd been doing. He wouldn't even explain why he wanted to do a special extra SAVE with Frisk that morning using his SOUL and a different password; he'd simply smiled and asked his siblings to trust him. "Oh, man. Sans is going to freak when he sees this. Where is he?"
"where you ain't lookin', kid," Sans replied. Toriel had helped him and his brother with their makeup; they looked like they'd stepped straight out of a Mexican Day of the Dead parade, which was exactly where Sans was going to shortcut himself and Papyrus once the Mt. Ebbot Halloween festival was over. The royal family had spared no expense for it. Every last kid from school had been invited to go trick-or-treating in their town, although some of the older ones bowed out. Every house would be offering treats, by royal decree; tricks, on the other hand, were not regulated. At least one of the kids had a Twitch livestream, which was sitting at some fifty thousand viewers and it wasn't even dark yet. Toriel had meticulously turned the school into a haunted house, dragooning twenty people, including her kids, to help. ("As if we don't have enough things we need to do, Mom!" "This is your duty as Dreemurrs, my children.")
"Frisk, Asriel, close your eyes," Toriel told them, and they gave each other a look before doing it. They heard Sans faintly chuckling. Lifting each leg in turn, Frisk felt a warm, furry costume being pulled up her body, a couple of weights next to her head (she knew, immediately, what the costume was) and Asriel grumbled as his ears were stuffed in his own costume, his mother putting his horns through holes in the hood.
"Leatherface would be proud," Charles said, and even Frisk could hear the look their mother gave him.
She finished up adjusting the costumes. "Open your eyes, my children!" she called brightly, clearly pleased with herself. Of course they were each other, Asriel's not-quite-human form shoved into a supple Frisk suit, suede leather serving as human skin (Charles was right, that was kind of creepy) and Frisk's combed-out hair as the actual hair, which masterfully hid his horns. In return, Frisk was wearing two large stuffed bags on the sides of her head as ears, her feet in comfortable Asriel paws and her hands in soft, furry gloves. She felt like she could wear it all day in cooler weather. Their clothes were the same as what they were when they'd first met. The only things left uncovered were their faces; wearing a snootle substitute would have been annoying for Frisk and there was just no way to hide Asriel's snootle without some gigantic head. They looked at each other, grinning.
"Mom, you made her a furry!" Charles shouted, laughing. "You know, there's a place for furries, and guess who's the master of it?" He pointed his thumb towards himself.
"You are being even more unruly than usual," Asgore told him, walking down the stairs. He tried to sound fierce, to match the real flame on top of his head, the detailed plastic wings on his back, and the printer's ink that turned his fur pitch black, but against Charles that wasn't even a joke.
"Don't give me that tonight, Dad," Charles said. "I know you have your traditions, but this night is Devil's night. My night." He thumped the butt of the pitchfork down for emphasis and resolved to keep it after Halloween was over. "I'll be back to normal by the time Sans is on the other side of the wall."
"If it's your night, then perhaps you can tell us what my costume will be?" Toriel asked, rapidly walking upstairs.
"Oooooh... good question." Charles went rifling through people's minds. Thousands of people had been purged since Christmas, with fewer EXP earners added, but there were a few brains that he really liked having access to and whose owners weren't keen on letting go of his evil power. "Okay, if Dad's Baphomet, which he kind of looks like already, and Frisk and Asriel are each other, which kind of makes sense, then this one has to make the same kind of sense. A queen goat, a mother, a..." He snapped his fingers in realization, just before she opened the door. "You're Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! Ia! Ia!"
"You are quite correct." Toriel's costume was a carefully crafted mass of tentacles, some of which waved back and forth under magical influence, and she had used the same ink on herself as her husband. The combination made her look terrifying, like something out of a nightmare. If she had looked like that when Frisk fell down, things would have happened much differently.
"The little kids are going to scream like crazy when they see you," Frisk said, suddenly grateful that Papyrus was off at the school-turned-haunted-house, preparing to serve as its guardian, warden, and master of ceremonies. "I think you might have overdone it. That's actually scary." She'd almost asked why Mom hadn't made her and Asriel's costumes just as scary, but she was scary enough as it was.
"There is no overdoing it on a night as important as this one," Toriel said. "Tonight, fear of monsters is a proper thing, and we must make our first modern Halloween a very special event. Come along; we all have our roles to play." Charles smiled widely, clearly willing to play his. They walked out together, Asgore staying home; someone had to hand out the candy, after all, and a Scandinavian chocolate company had created a delicious Asgore-branded confection that the Dreemurrs had ordered in bulk because a certain devil kid had a tendency to eat it that way.
Down the hill, the festival was beginning, pumpkins and orange lights everywhere. It was a clear Halloween night, a few days after a new moon. The festival proper was on the school grounds; Muffet was still doing charity work, with massive kegs of spider cider on hand, and a fat monster with a wobbly tail was clumsily setting up his table to do sketch commissions. A few vendors from major companies were handing out free samples of Halloween-themed swag to any kid who wanted them, which was certain to be almost all of them.
The kids came in a few at a time, being waved through the security checkpoint with their parents, the MPs surreptitiously recording the weight of each car while Undyne stood around and looked menacing in her full armor. If the weight of a car on a remembered day was different than an unremembered day, that was when the real security came out. Charles, watching his mother greet each car (to varying reactions) as it was waved through, felt sort of disappointed that nobody'd ever tried attacking Mt. Ebbot. There were people who wished the Dreemurrs harm, but most of them were on the other side of the ocean and even they knew it was pointless to try. Charles would have to make his own fun instead.
One little girl in a fire-retardant fairy costume, her car seat made of flameproof neoprene, shrank back and screamed on seeing the terrible gaze of Shub-Toriel through her window, her hands glowing with magic and terror.
"Oh, honey, it's okay, it's only your school principal!" her mother tried to console her.
"EEEEEEEE!"
Laughing and grinning, Charles walked up to the next car, but his grin was matched by Jack in the back seat, who was wearing a robe that made him look like a miniature Asmodeus. Witches and warlocks were in this year, for obvious reasons. Among the kids, there were several Harries Potter and Hermiones Granger, there were at least three Gandalves among the fathers and two Glendas among the mothers, and there was a Maleficent, a fairy godmother, and a lot of similar costumes, some inventive and some derivative from fiction. Superhero costumes were also in (Nicole was dressed as Batgirl), even though the kids wearing them got tired quickly using superpowers. While humans elsewhere dressed up like monsters, that was rare at Mt. Ebbot; what kind of kid would dress up as his friend from class? There were a few highly imaginative monster costumes that corresponded to no known monster and one officially licensed Walt costume (oh, that takes me back, Frisk thought), but the only other recognizable monster costume was worn by Frisk herself. Similarly, Asriel wore the only human suit, and Charles wasn't the only one to reference Ed Gein.
There weren't any speeches, any massive congregations. Toriel was giving the children license to explore and do what they wanted, and quite a number of them made a straight beeline for the Dreemurr family mansion; they'd seen it so many times from school but never got the chance to go there, and His Majesty as the Sabbatic Goat wasn't nearly so scary when surrounded by a lot of brightly colored flowers and conventional jack-o-lanterns, even if Charles had carved them without bothering to use a knife.
Other kids went straight to Frisk and Asriel, and more than a few of the younger pre-teens wanted to touch Frisk's costume ears, cuddling the stuffing underneath. "Now you know how it feels!" Asriel yelled, laughing. "That's what my life's like, Frisk. What you're going through now. Right there." Some of the older ones pretended that they didn't know the costumes were costumes: "You're looking pretty tall today, Frisk!" "Gee, Asriel, did you get a lot shorter?" But it was all in good fun and about a dozen of them, Jack and Nicole included, followed the Dreemurrs from house to house, trick-or-treating in the usual way even though most of them were nominally too old for it. Two older teenagers, dressed up like Fred and Daphne from Scooby-Doo, took a different direction than the others, going off alone into the bushes, and everyone old enough to figure it out pretended not to notice, and Asriel found it impolitic to point out that he could easily hear them even with his ears shoved under the costume.
"Trick or treat- oh crap," Jack said as they reached Asmodeus' house. Of course his daughter was off with a supervised group of young children, including Kid and Kim. Of course he was at home handing out candy, not saying anything, simply dropping handfuls of candy into each kid's bag, even the Dreemurrs', because it was scarier that way. And of course he really was dressed the same as Jack, using his robe as a costume. Even though they all had his powers, he'd somehow managed to stay The Wizard, an inscrutable man of strange and unknowable magicks, and dressing the same as him seemed like an unwise form of mockery. Jack only noticed after he got the door slammed in his face that he did, in fact, receive a few more Tootsie Rolls than the others.
The skeletons' house was mostly dark. The door was ajar, creaking back and forth in the wind. Something was flickering in the back. The other kids started walking right past it, because that was what you did with dark houses on Halloween night, but they didn't know that Toriel had ordered every home open for the holiday. "There's something weird in there," Asriel said. "Sans and Papyrus are in the school, and Gaster's down at the festival, so..." He listened more closely. "It's creepy music and some kind of machine."
"We have got to check it out," Jack said, and while some of the kids were scared, nobody disagreed. Walking into creepy situations was what Halloween was for. Taking point, he pushed open the door, shining a flashlight beam from his hand. Some areas of the house were blocked off by spiderwebs, which Frisk suspected were gifts from Muffet. Only a couple of kids had the presence of mind to notice the "Please Take One" bowl and take pieces of monster candy. The light was coming from the basement, and the basement door was left ajar. Gaster's lab.
"Hey, I recognize this music," Nicole said. "It's from- EEEEEE!" Her scream was nearly as high in pitch as the little girl on seeing her principal, and Frisk and Asriel also screamed, seeing the lumbering, robotic thing walk up the stairs towards them, its pointed teeth in a terrible grin and its tattered, furry arms stretched out in a hug. A rabbit ear fell in front of its right eye, and the other stuck straight up, its eye shining in the darkness like a twisted, horrific version of Sans.
"I just want to give you a hug!" it yelled in a warbling, electronic voice, but by then half the kids were already out the front door and Asriel had already grabbed Frisk to fly out- it was either that or a nice, fat Chaos Saber right into the thing's head.
"Hey, Frisk, whose house is this?!" Jack demanded, panting, He'd slammed the door shut but of course it wasn't staying closed, and it resumed creaking just as it had before, the robot retreating into the darkness to scare another group of kids.
"Gaster's," Frisk replied. Jack had a great many unkind words for Gaster, and Frisk felt it was a bad time to mention that she was actually about to hug the thing, just to see what would happen, before Asriel had dragged her away. Jack went on to suggest that he might want to stand outside the door and tell people not to go into that house and get scared by the robot, both of which he had even more unkind words for.
"Don't do that," Asriel said. "It's Halloween. If you try to warn people away you're just advertising for him. C'mon." The next house was Undyne's, and Alphys stood in the doorway, looking nervous and handing out packages of pocky and other Japanese sweets that still smelled of a Saitama convenience store.
Frisk, feeling devilish (where'd Charles go, anyway?) decided to introduce her. "Hey, everyone. This is Alphys. She's really good at building robots."
It took exactly half a second for it to sink in, but it was hard for the kids to get mad at the little lizard, who was obviously uncomfortable being introduced that way. "You got me good," Jack said instead. "You got all of us good."
"Hey, what would have happened if I would have actually hugged it?" Frisk asked.
"Um, nothing. It, um, wasn't programmed to do anything other than walk. The arms don't even move."
"Next year, make one that actually gives hugs," Frisk suggested. "But make it scarier. And set it loose around town."
"Why do you want to scare people like that?!" Nicole asked.
"It's Halloween!" everyone answered her.
The next house was the Dreemurr mansion, and Frisk and Asriel stayed back, not wanting to embarrass themselves by trick-or-treating at their own house. "Hey, I hear Charles," Asriel said quietly. "He's... whispering to us. He wants us to follow him." And that actually scared both of them for a moment, even though these were the Dreemurr kids and they had nothing to be afraid of. "Well," Frisk rhetorically asked, "what are we going to do? Not go after him?" That would have been against the spirit of the holiday.
"Beware, for there is devilry afoot!" Asriel exclaimed in a fake deep voice, and as Frisk laughed, Asriel made sure no one was looking at them before he intoned a precise set of syllables and vanished from view, taking Frisk's hand. Frisk pulled out her phone with her other hand, fumbling with her oversized furry gloves, and cast the invisibility spell series on herself. Asriel tugged his sister towards the whispers, trying to keep up. Charles led them away from the houses, away from everything, towards no path, and they dispelled their invisibility because there was nobody to see them. Without a moon in the sky, the mountain was pitch black, and the kids couldn't possibly have kept going without magical flashlights and movement. "Hey, guys, we're chasing our brother," Asriel said to nobody as they magically hopped over the fence. Echolocation was the only reasonable technological means of catching flying invisible people, and Asriel heard the high-frequency sound. For more than a mile, Charles led them over rocks, through forests, past a cliff face, and around to the other side of the mountain. Getting exhausted, Frisk wondered if Asriel was just playing a trick on her, but he seemed just as confused as she was.
"He says it's here," Asriel said abruptly, shining his light around. He spied a devil's face magically carved into the rock, hidden behind a bush. The sculpture was excellent, clearly crafted with magic, with an open mouth just wide enough for Frisk and Asriel to crawl into without much fuss.
"Wow. I guess we know what Charles was doing and why he wanted to do that other SAVE this morning," Frisk said. "I bet you anything it's full of traps."
"Yeah, but it's like you said- what are we going to do, not go in?" Asriel rhetorically asked. Their brother had clearly taken care and pride in making the entrance, at least; it would be exceptionally impolite not to crawl into it.
"Wait," Frisk said, reaching into her Halloween pail. "I think we're going to need this." Frisk and Asriel gobbled up as much sugary candy as they could, then they magically melted and burned the plastic together and threw it into the mouth. It didn't set anything off.
"I'll go first," Asriel said before Frisk could. They crawled for ten feet before they could stand up again into a small cavern, and once they stood up, old incandescent bulbs, held up by a wire on the ceiling, dimly flickered on and another mechanism started churning. "Yup, traps," Frisk said. Although this wasn't really a trap, per se. Going down the hallway in front of them, a series of spikes came out of the floor, reaching almost all the way to the ceiling. The sequence was a wave, from near to far before the near spikes restarted again.
They could have disabled the mechanism through smashing something important; Asriel could have transformed for half a second and bent just one of the spikes out of place, probably screwing up the whole thing. But that would have been against the unspoken rules. "That's pretty fast," Asriel said. "It's... faster than we can fly, I think."
"We can do it," Frisk said. "It's all about when we start. We have to chase the spikes." They'd done this before, in platformers; she didn't see the problem with doing it for real. "Ready... set... go go go!" She launched herself into the trap as soon as the first spikes came up, putting her sprinting, padded foot down as soon as they retracted, her brother beside her, running as fast as they could. The spikes outpaced them, and even Frisk could hear the sequence restarting behind them, but a few more steps and they were safe. "Okay. Whew, there's- oh, come on!" In front of them, a series of pendulum axe blades started swinging back and forth at irregular intervals.
"Can we slip between them?" Asriel asked. "Just stand, and wait for the next one, and stand..."
"That'd be hard," Frisk said. There didn't seem to be enough room for that. She gauged the timing carefully, and worked out with her brother the best time to go. It was like walking through a crowded room, really, only the crowd was made out of painful death. She and her brother slipped around the final blade just before it would have chopped her in half. "Charles..." She just sighed, and Asriel laughed. "Okay. Next one is... oh come on, enough with the blades, don't you have anything else?!" Frisk shouted to the air, certain that Charles could hear her. This time, a series of buzzsaws came out of the walls, although the hallway seemed wider here, more cylindrical. She studied the blades, trying to get the timing. There were three layers, high, middle, and low, and it reminded her of Muffet's spiders.
"We gotta move now!" Asriel shouted, pointing upwards. Above them, a deep rumbling was audible, and a gigantic flaming boulder came rolling towards them from a hole in the ceiling, promising pulverized bones and a humiliating LOAD.
"Charles, you dick!" Frisk yelled, ducking under some buzzsaws and jumping over others, and when a low and a high came at once she dived between them and started flying, first under a middle and a high and above a middle and a low, the boulder still rumbling behind them. A thirty-foot rope bridge swayed in front of them above a pool of water, and the kids took a few desperate steps on it before the boulder came crashing through it with a tremendous splash, and they flew through the air long enough to reach the end, Frisk panting with exhaustion. In front of them was the exit, a crevice hidden from the outside by a tree that they had to wiggle around. Charles was there waiting for them, smiling.
"Well? How'd you like it?" Charles asked.
"I thought we agreed that if you ever did this, it wouldn't actually kill us!" Frisk shouted.
"Az heard me in there, didn't you Az?" Asriel nodded. "I filled it with cameras. The blades and spikes were me turning a crank. And if the boulder ever got close I would have just busted out of the wall and stopped it. And if it would have gone wrong you could just have LOADed to our special save and very few people would have known. Besides, this was you two. That was easy for you, there was no way you were going to lose to that. You didn't even mess up your costumes!" He sounded disappointed in himself, as if he didn't add enough challenge. "I'm sorry I didn't make it longer, though. Just didn't have time. Hey, gimme some candy." Asriel and Frisk realized that they were still firmly clutching their Halloween pails and held them out to their brother, who started unwrapping candy by wishing the wrappers apart. "Come on, admit it. You enjoyed that."
Frisk reluctantly smiled, realizing how much trouble this must have been for him, how many days it must have taken to set everything up, just so she and Asriel could have a few minutes of high-octane terrifying fun. "Yeah... I did. Did you, Az?"
"Yeah, that was cool."
Frisk smiled wider. "Thanks. You really went far for us."
"Hey, no problem. When you LOAD, I'm going to fill all that back in," Charles explained around a mouthful of Tootsie Rolls and candy corn. "Maybe I'll dig it out in a few years, add some more stuff to it. I had to stick it all way out here, though, didn't want anybody running into it." He led them back around the mountain to where they came, bright lanterns coming from his outstretched hands.
"Uh, guys?" Asriel said as they walked down the hill. "Something's going on at school."
"They didn't miss us, did they?" Frisk asked.
"No, it's something else. I think people are hurting." That was enough to get the three of them flying down the hill, Charles carrying his siblings around the waist. He flung open the door and the three of them were blasted by a wave of stench that smelled like someone had bombed a septic tank with chemical weapons and tried to cover it up with a thousand rotten eggs. Frisk wondered if someone had set something off as a prank before she turned a corner, hearing the groans of agony, and saw the enormous crowds outside the bathrooms.
"There she is!" a kid yelled, pointing. "Frisk, you've gotta LOAD! Please!" His cry was taken up by a sizable majority of people in the hallway. Many of them were clutching their stomachs. Some of them got down on their knees in supplication, hands folded in prayer. A few people made no sounds at all, their arms on their abdomens in wordless agony; others made sounds, but not with their mouths, and there was enough of that in a few seconds to fill three seasons of Beavis and Butthead. A few of the younger kids had telltale brown stains in their pants and were crying and screaming, while everyone else begged Frisk to please just make it stop. Frisk, who had gotten very unused to this sort of thing- especially from people in her school- was shocked in place, and Asriel didn't say anything either; instead, he was touching the stomach of one of the children, trying to figure out what had gone wrong and coming up empty. He wondered if a terrorist had used some kind of biological attack. Charles was quivering with rage, denting his steel pitchfork by gripping it too hard. Someone- or something- had caused terrible harm to his school, his people, and he would make the bastard pay.
"Frisk, please do it now," an somewhat familiar-looking man implored, clutching his stomach while trying to sound reasonable. "If anyone gets mad I'll back you up."
Frisk's paralysis broke. "Woah! Fine! Okay! Just let me warn everybody!" she shouted to answering cheers of relief. She pulled out her phone, and when she pressed the button for a thirty-second warning, the man's phone said something unintelligible. Ah, that was Jack's dad, the rememberer, and his expressions of gratitude were matched by practically everyone else in the hallway. Both her mother and Papyrus were coming down the hall from different directions, Papyrus with a shocked look and Toriel, still in full Lovecraftian costume, looking like she was going to do very painful things to the skeleton. "What the heck happened?!" Frisk asked.
"I'M SO SORRY!" Papyrus blubbered. "I DIDN'T WANT TO GIVE THEM MORE SUGAR BECAUSE THEN THEY'D GET RAMBUNCTIOUS AND MAGICAL! PLEASE FORGIVE ME, YOUR MAJESTY!"
"Just tell me what you fed them," Shub-Toriel demanded.
"HARIBO SUGAR-FREE GUMMI BEARS!"
And the Devil knew the name of his equal.
==LOAD==