Adrian
If he had the energy, Adrian would have yelled aloud, attempted to divert the attention of Muffet's nightmarish pet cupcake as it went on torturing Nyssa. Every time those teeth closed on the white part of Nyssa's soul, their sting tore through Adrian as well–a reminder that Wing's shattered pieces remained part of the same soul–but he knew it was nothing compared to what she was experiencing.
"You're still alive?" Muffet remarked, faintly amused.
Let me go!
Nyssa's screams filled the air, an cacophony of pain that wormed its way into Adrian's head and shot adrenaline into his bloodstream.
With one hard wrench of his arm, the Temmie Armor jacket–which he'd forgotten he was wearing–began to slip off. Muffet didn't notice–her attention remained on Nyssa and her pet, licking her lips greedily as she looked on. Nyssa had gone silent and hung limply from the web as her HP was steadily gnawed away. Had she passed out?
Adrian continued wriggling his way out of the jacket until both his arms were free. This was progress, this was a chance for him to get to Nyssa, this was–
Muffet looked up, and his heart dropped.
"Oh, not so fast, dearie. Your turn is coming too, you know~"
Her spiders–real ones, this time–scuttled across the web toward Adrian in a black tide, mandibles clicking eagerly as they rushed to consume him.
Nyssa struggled to turn from where she had been tied up, conscious after all. Just as she was about to call out, Muffet's pet bit her soul one more time, and pain spiked through both her and Adrian's bodies.
"Adrian!"
Nyssa's cry in his ears and the new wave of agony in his soul assaulting him at once flipped a switch in him, and suddenly his palms were ablaze with purple magic.
Whipping around to face the oncoming horde of spiders, he signed shield, and the wave crashed against a barrier of Wingdings. The symbols were nowhere near as bright or as consistent as Nyssa's were, but they were there, and he had bought them time.
"So it's true!" Muffet exclaimed, more amused than anything. "Humans with monster magic!" She giggled, teasingly patting the head of the spider closest to her. "That'll give a nice kick to the flavor, I think~"
The spider prodded one of Muffet's many arms with a foreleg, waving a small sheet of yellow paper in the air.
"Hmm? What's this? A telegram…?"
Adrian's shield faltered, but all the spiders besieging him had turned their attention to Muffet. She held the paper up to eye level.
"It's from the spiders in the Ruins… and it says… you did donate to our cause…! Oh my, this has all been a big understanding!"
Muffet's pet left Nyssa alone, picking its way across the silk strands to take a place at Muffet's side. Adrian let out a huge sigh of relief, the stickiness of the web already beginning to melt away aound him. The Temmie Armor dropped from where it had been entangled, and Adrian caught it in his arms.
"I thought you hated spiders… but no… the person who asked for your souls must have meant a different pair of humans with magic! Ahuhuhu~ I'll make it up to you… you're welcome to my parlor any time, dearies!"
He and Nyssa were gently set back onto the ground, their souls returned to their regular colors. Adrian ran over to his friend. She could barely support herself on her own two feet, clinging to a length of spider silk to stay upright. Her face was even paler than usual, some of the light gone from her blue eyes.
Adrian wished they'd had the foresight to give her the armor instead.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah," Nyssa began, but a quick check of her stats proved otherwise.
"Nyssa, your HP is at 202 right now."
Her eyes widened disbelievingly. "4444 to… 202… so quickly?"
"I can't believe it, either."
"But even with 202 HP, shouldn't I still be more than okay? Don't many monsters live their lives perfectly fine with, like, 80 max?"
Adrian bit his lip. "Based on what Wing knew, monster HP isn't an absolute measure across all species–the number doesn't always indicate the same level of strength. How well you feel is supposed to be… proportional to your maximum HP. So even if you have 202 now, you're doing no better than if your max was 22 and you were at 1."
"Nice math," Nyssa replied limply. "I guess that explains why I feel so drained."
"I'm so sorry about my pet, dearie," Muffet called. A group of spiders scuttled over and stopped right in front of Nyssa, carrying a delicate porcelain cup of purple tea. "Have some tea." When Nyssa peered at the liquid suspiciously, Muffet giggled. "It won't bite you, you know! No fresh spiders in that one~"
Still tentative, Nyssa looped a finger through the handle of the teacup and raised it to her lips.
"Thanks," she muttered.
"I told you I'd make it up," Muffet replied. "Neither of you are anywhere near in shape to go outside, ahuhu~ we'd love it if you could stay for tea~"
No thanks, we need to get to the CORE quickly, Adrian was about to say, but something stopped him. Who knew whether they'd get to recover their HP like this again before they met Xandre?
"Maybe for a little while," Adrian allowed, "before we have to get going."
"Oh, good." As Muffet spoke, the spiders delivered a crossiant to Adrian, bringing him some much-needed HP.
"Spiders have been trapped in the Ruins for generations," Muffet mused, mostly to herself. "Even past the door, Snowdin's bitter cold is impassible. Even with all our fundraisers, we still don't have enough Gold to pay for a warm way out… if only another human passed through here, one I didn't mind eating up…"
"There is another one with a human-monster soul like ours," Adrian said quickly. "Xandre. He's been killing monsters his whole way through the Underground. What's left of Snowdin and Waterfall have been evacuated already, and so has the adjacent part of Hotland, as far as I know."
"Alphys will organize more evacuations in this area soon," Nyssa added. "You're all going to leave, right?"
"Oh, no... it's too good an opportunity to miss… another juicy human soul? I'm going to get big money from this, dearie. More than enough to pay the spiders' way to freedom."
"He'll kill you."
"I'd like to see him try," Muffet giggled. "Don't worry, love. My spiders and I will make a very tasty batch of pastries with his soul. I'll send over some to you, if you like~"
Adrian exchanged a glance with Nyssa. This isn't the first time we've had this conversation with a monster. Not the first time they failed to realize how outmatched they are.
It's not every day some genocidal freak decimates the Underground with my dead sister in tow. Bile rose in Adrian's throat again. Some genocidal, lovesick freak.
If what Xandre said was true, that only made him yet more dangerous, yet more disgusting. That murderer really thought he was tearing a thousand lives apart for love.
"Adrian? Are you okay?"
Through the red-tinged haze of Adrian's thoughts, he barely registered Nyssa's voice.
He pictured the two of them together, Chara and the destroyer of the Underground. He pictured Xandre caressing her soul in his hands, brilliant red, his captive, his obsession. Adrian wanted to be sick, he really thought he was going to be sick–
"Adrian!"
His name was like a punch to the gut, breaking through his stupor all at once, and his attention snapped back to the situation at hand. Muffet perched on a spider-silk hammock opposite him, and Nyssa remained seated at his side. Muffet was happily busy with her tea and spider biscuits but Nyssa glared at him, blue eyes flashing with a mix of anger and concern.
"What's happening to you?" she hissed.
Adrian struggled to shove away the sickening thoughts again. "I just… zoned out for a bit. Sorry. Where were we?"
"That look on your face was like... like you wanted to kill someone."
Muffet peered up from her teacup. "Something out of place, dearies?"
"We're all good," Nyssa told Muffet lightly. "Adrian just nodded off for a bit." She caught his eye, sending him a sharp glance and mouthing, we're talking about this later.
Xandre
{I think we have a problem.}
Xandre cursed, nearly slipping on a puddle of slime as he continued hacking the creatures into ever-smaller pieces. He tightened his grip on the jar in his hand, now more than half full of glistening red DT. [What?]
{Is this just going to go on… forever? When will they stop attacking you?}
[Good question. These things won't stop.]
{Hey. I have an idea.}
[Do tell.] Xandre flung a wriggling piece of slime off his shoulder, now soaked in DT. [Please.]
{Feed them.}
[What?]
{They haven't even hurt you, did you notice that? They're poking around in your pockets. Like they want something from you.}
Shifting his gaze down to his pants pocket, overflowing with a mass of white ooze, Xandre realized that Chara was right. "Out!" he hissed, smearing it across the wall. Unharmed by the abuse, the slime crawled back onto the ground, heading for Xandre again.
{Get some food from your bag.}
Strangely, the moment Xandre turned around, the creatures stopped their assault, almost as if waiting in anticipation. He closed his hand around an oddly shaped, cold object, and found an apple shaped like a crab. The living slime leaned in eagerly.
"Go fetch."
He hurled the Crab Apple across the room and all the creatures immediately took off in pursuit, leaving him alone in his white-and-red-splattered clothes.
[Good going. We'd better leave before they come back for more.]
Nyssa
"We'll have to move a lot faster now," Nyssa decided. "Muffet's trap slowed us down too much. I don't know where Xandre is now, but I'm willing to guess he's close behind us."
Her HP had been fully restored during the tea party but still Nyssa's muscles burned, even more so with the exertion of carrying her newly heavy bag. Muffet had sent the humans off with a bag of Spider Donuts and two extra jars of cider, promising them a share of Xandre's soul.
She still had no idea.
The best Nyssa and Adrian could do was leave her a warning and set off for the CORE again.
Xandre
[Which way out?]
{Out from this room, back toward the main elevator. That'll take us up to the lab.}
[Right…]
"Howdy!"
The familiar voice came from one of the examination tables. Xandre stepped around the feasting globs of slime, which were still slowly digesting his Crab Apple, and bent over to peer underneath.
The fallen prince.
"Flowey?" he hissed. "Is that you?"
The weed snickered from the shadows. "I see you've met some of my former roommates already."
"'Roommates'?" Xandre froze. "You mean the stuff from the sink?"
He remembered it rising, towering above him. The amorphous forms that had confronted him.
"What do you know about that? Them? And stop being so loud," he added. "Alphys and Undyne are down here too."
"Amalgamates," Flowey corrected him, only slightly quieter. He stuck his head into view, the brightness of his golden petals misplaced down here among the blackness of secrets and lies. "They were once monsters, you know."
"What… what happened to them?"
"Determination poisoning," the flower replied matter-of-factly. "You learned none of this from Dr. Wingding or whatever?"
"He died before there was any Determination–he called it DT–to experiment with, so he has no memories of it. All his postulations were theoretical. And his name is Wing Gaster."
"The old fool," Flowey chuckled to himself. "Well. When you're a monster and you've fallen down, an injection of DT feels like a miracle. You wake up. You move around. You feel alive again. For a few hours, you dare to believe the impossible: that you've been rescued from death itself."
Deep within the lab, the ventilation pipes shuddered in trepidation.
"Maybe a day after the injection, its other effects kick in. You get drowsy, like your legs can't hold you up anymore. You can't think straight or control your impulses. Then your body literally starts melting, bit by bit. A drop here, a drop there, before your limbs meld together. Some of those monsters' noses and mouths got sealed shut." There was not a touch of compassion in Flowey's voice. "If you're near others when that happens, you stick to them, too. And it's impossible to separate."
"They're stuck like that? For the rest of their lives?"
"Don't sound so horrified," Flowey replied disdainfully. "By that stage, there's nothing left of their former selves. They're just animals looking for their next meal."
Xandre shuddered. He thought of the things, bits of themselves sloughing off with each step. They were the dust, the grime, the air in this lab. They were everywhere. Remnants of an experiment gone wrong; one Royal Scientist's living, breathing failures.
"That thing just wouldn't die, no matter how many times I attacked it. It just kept breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. Why?"
"DT doesn't let them die so easily. You can't even put them out of their misery before it finishes dissolving them from the inside." Flowey gave a dark chuckle, glancing over at the feasting Amalgamates. "Their minds were the first to go. Nothing left to pity, even if you wanted to pity those… things."
"How do you know this, anyway?"
"When I looked through all the memories I woke up with, I found something that wasn't from the prince. I saw smiley trashbag and weeaboo lizard working in this miserable dump." Flowey's mouth leered into a grin. "They injected me, too, way back when I was a regular flower and Asriel was still alive. Wanted to see if they could make a being from a DT-infused vessel, lacking a soul. Well, they succeeded, didn't they?"
The Amalgamates went on attacking the Crab Apple, hacking it to pieces with whatever they still had left of their teeth and jaws.
"DT, huh? What'd that do to you?"
"Besides giving me consciousness, you mean?" the flower gave a little giggle. "Oh, I had a lot of fun, Xandre. You'd never believe me if I told you."
"Well, as much as I want to know, try that another time. We should go before Undyne and Alphys find us."
"Oh, really?" Flowey cocked his head. "Where to?"
"Just tell me how to get to the CORE from here."
"So bossy," Flowey muttered. "You know the elevator in the room before this one? Not the one you came down from."
"You mean the one to the palace."
"Yeah. When you reach the top, there'll be another elevator right next to it. That leads straight down into the CORE, through the back entrance."
"There's a back entrance?"
"Well… yes?" Flowey rolled his eyes. "Wingding conveniently didn't leave you that memory?"
Despite himself, Xandre felt a grin creep up his face. No matter how much farther Nyssa and Adrian have walked, they have no hope of beating me there. He liked that. He'd take the backhanded way, the roundabout way.
They would never see him coming.
September 15, 2018: Undertale's third anniversary.
Others may say "Undertale is cringy" or "Undertale is dead", but if you are even reading this, you know that is not true. After three years, here we are, still going strong. Overshadowed by our fandom's terrible reputation are the profound things, the beautiful things. These are the things I want to celebrate today. Not only these things, but every person who has helped to make the Undertale community the way it is today. I am proud to be a part of it, proud to be call this fandom my own.
Here's to the magic of Undertale; here's to the unique light it has brought to our lives.
Happy anniversary!
