Blue rubbed his eye sockets for the upteenth time. They felt like raw sand had been scrubbed all over them. When he opened them again, he was met with the same sight he'd been seeing for the past several hours: the closed, locked door of the brothers' home. All the locks were in the same place. The dent on the knob hadn't turned. The rug was still bunched up in the exact same way. No one had opened the door. Sans still wasn't home.

Footsteps sounded from the balcony behind him. Blue jumped and turned to face them. It was only Papyrus, dressed in plaid pajamas and yellow slippers, making his way by magic light down the stairs to the bottom floor. Blue sighed and turned his attention back to the door. He was sitting there waiting for it to open like some fairytale princess in a tower. Heh. He really was a damsel in distress.

"he does this all the time, you know," Papyrus said from behind him. "he can be gone for days at a time if her majesty is in a lusty mood. he'll be back eventually with some outrageous story about what they did this time."

Blue turned his head and blearily stared at the other. He seemed so confident in his opinion, but...Blue couldn't shake the feeling that this was different. His soul was screaming at him that something was wrong. He had no evidence that he could show Papyrus, no clue that would turn him to his side. He just had a feeling. A small, sad feeling in the crux of his soul. But it wouldn't go away.

"can't we just...call him?" Blue asked without much hope.

What little hope he had was dashed when Papyrus shook his head. "phones don't work inside the palace anymore. her majesty doesn't trust them not to be spying on her."

Blue asked desperately, "is there anything we can do to check up on him? i just have a really, really bad feeling in my soul. it feels like when i was with empress undyne. like...fear and relentless pain."

Papyrus stared at him with a look Blue couldn't place. It went on for a long, long time. Then Papyrus sighed and headed back up the stairs.

"wait! i didn't mean to-"

"i'm going up to get changed. then we're going to see muffet. i...can't tell you why just yet. okay?" Papyrus locked eyes with him.

Blue opened his mouth to protest being left in the dark. Then he closed it. He trusted Papyrus. The other would tell him when the time was right. "heh. guess this is the multiverse's revenge on me for every time i pulled that move on my brother. i'll bite. let's go."

Papyrus grinned. "good choice. better than staring at a door for hours on end, huh?"

Blue blushed. "sh-shut up."

A deep chuckle reverberated down the stairs that Papyrus was now climbing. "never. now, get yourself untangled while i get dressed to go."

The din reached their ears long before they reached the hallway that led to her parlor. The sound of wood breaking, glass shattering, metal deforming, and fabric tearing told a destructive story of pure fury. Blue shot a nervous look at Papyrus. He didn't seem to be worried, so Blue pulled himself together as best he could (Hah. That was hilarious. He was literally held together by stitches.) and forced himself to walk on as if nothing was wrong.

Papyrus opened the door to the parlor and calmly dodged a flying teacup. It smashed against the far wall, scatting ceramic pieces all over the hallway. Sans had to carefully shuffle his feet to avoid getting impaled. Finally he made it into the room and gawked.

The once neat walls of the once neat den were ragged and torn. The wallpaper had been shredded. The picture frames had been warped and shattered. The wall sconces had been pulled from their sockets and were fizzling. And that was just the walls. The rest of the room was even worse.

Standing in the middle of it all, with her hair disheveled and her clothes crooked, was Muffet. Magic like a spider's web was stretching out of her into every corner of the room. The purple strands were attached to everything. They looked sharp as hell and Blue did not want to be there one too try and cross it to get to her.

Apparently Papyrus did. Here strode into the room confidently, and the strands snapped in front of him like cobwebs. Blue stared agog as her walked right up to Muffet's back and laid a hand on her left shoulder. She spun around clockwise with her elbows cocked and ready to snap a rib or two. Papyrus neatly sidestepped these, his hand never leaving her shoulder. When she had spun enough to see who ward touching her she stopped. The fury and there fight didn't leave her eyes. If anything they increased by at least a factor of 6.

"muffet," Papyrus said, a thousand words in a alien language that Blue did not know passing by, unsaid.

"Martha just sent in a report. She's got him, Papyrus. She's got him in her dungeon on the bloody rack. There's some kind of strange, flaming sigil burned into that chest he never shows us. Martha says it moves like lava and a snake combined. She's been torturing him most of the day. It took this long for Martha's report to make it in. She's probably still torturing him. Martha's said she didn't look anywhere near close to wanting to stop."

Blue couldn't see what Papyrus' face looked like when he heard the news. Here could only see the smoke bubbling up around him, sizzling against the magic silk like strong acid. Blue didn't want to stick around to hear any more of what they said. He was not in the mood to be dissolved alive by gaseous acid. Unfortunately, he didn't get that choice. Muffet's strings ensnared him and raised him up to the corner of the ceiling furthest away from Papyrus. While he appreciated the gesture, he really did, he'd much prefer somewhere more private to have his personal panic attack. Luckily neither of them seemed to be paying him much attention. They were too engrossed in what they were arguing about.

"-at least fourty monsters to deal with the gate guards alone," was the first thing Blue actually heard Papyrus say.

"Make it sixty to be on the safe side. We'll probably hit the changing of the shifts. That means double the trouble, but half the brains," Muffet added.

"true. we can probably get the madjicks on or side just by telling them about the sigil. you just know they'll want to decipher it."

Muffet suggested, "What about the fire elementals? They'll be furious that she would turn on her lover with so little provocation. They're such sentimentalists."

Blue slowly relaxed. These two clearly had it covered. He could panic in relative peace, knowing that they would tell him exactly what, where, and when he needed to act. He trusted them to plot this out. They'd clearly been ready for it for a long time.