Notes from the Author: I just wanted to take a minute to apologize for taking so long to get this very short chapter out! My writing and reading schedule has been REALLY out of whack lately, and the time I've got to work on Mephibosheth and my other fics has been cut by roughly 75%. I'll still try and get at least one chapter out a week! :D RecommendedVibe for the chapter: Aboard Divine Beast Vah Ruta Extended.
The CORE was silent.
Chara liked it best that way.
He pressed down the waxy, purple collar of his lab coat and carefully adjusted the crown on his head. The handsome, thick leather soles of his boots thumped on the tile floor in perfect time with his heartbeat. Small rivulets of sweat trickled down the back of his neck and pooled under his coat, and he sighed as the chilly AC air cooled his scalp.
Not another soul was here. Probably because it was Angel's Day, or Sunday, and all the religious saps were sitting at home and praying for deliverance. Chara chuckled to himself. If they wanted a revolution, they would need to wake up and grab the winds of change with their own two hands. It was people like him, people like Dr. Gaster and Bettie and Lambdys, who worked day in and day out to force redemption from the cold, dead hands of an unresponsive god, who would bring change. They would be the ones history would forever remember, not the Angel or its followers.
Chara swapped his keycard - his, not one pilfered from Asgore - across the electric pad on Gaster's office door. The Royal Scientist had ordered the installation of new, mechanized doors for every high-level scientist working in the CORE to preserve the confidentiality and integrity of the human SOUL experiments, and they were surprisingly stylish. The aquamarine metal slid aside with a hiss, and Chara stepped inside Gaster's refurbished office. It was a picture of perfection. A file cabinet stood in the corner, the new resting place of Gaster's miscellaneous files, diagrams, and calculations. Scientific posters and blueprints were carefully tacked to one wall, each separated by exactly two hand-lengths. They were more for aesthetic appeal than scientific reference, but they looked nice anyway. A massive Periodic Table was hung on the opposite wall and its laminated surface was covered in red and blue markings. The Royal Scientist himself sat at his desk, which was empty save for the singular, glossy blueprint flickering under the weak lamplight. The human took a second to congratulate himself on his redecoration efforts before sidling up to Gaster.
"Are those the diagrams?" Chara asked as he gave the blueprint a hard, grizzled stare.
"We outsource dozens of design projects every month. You'll need to be more specific with your question if you want a straight answer."
Chara grunted at Gaster's circumlocutory manner of speech. "You know what I mean by 'designs.' I'm talking about the ones for the synthetic SOUL containers."
"Yes, then. This is that." Gaster pressed the blueprint's curled edges down and hovered his hand over the glassy surface to block out the lamp's glare. Chara rested his arm on the desk and peered closely at the blue sheet in front of him. The CORE's insignia, along with the logo of the design company, were embossed in one corner. At least half a dozen different designs, varying from simple heart-shaped glass bottles to intricate webbed matrices, dotted the page. Words so small that they were essentially unreadable were scrawled underneath each diagram: possible materials, postulated functionalities, pros and cons and drawbacks and advantages.
"This doesn't look special. Pshh, it looks like even Asriel coulda designed some of them. Look at this glass heart one - I think Ms. Queen Mom has a perfume bottle that looks just like it," Chara smirked. The Royal Scientist gave his assistant a blank, unreadable stare, but said nothing more. The vacant, black look in the pits of his eyes could have communicated anything from murder to mild disinterest. It didn't matter to Chara; he'd stopped trying to read Gaster a long time ago. All the human could do now was shrink back and hope he didn't tread too often on his idol's toes.
"None of these are made of glass. It's too delicate of a material to hold something as corrosive as a liquid, synthetic SOUL." Gaster's eyelights flickered back on, but they were focused on something between the blueprint and the desk beneath it. There was a vague, distant air about him that seemed to consume the whole room. "Some of these are made of specific alloys, diamonds, and others of industrial-grade plastics. There's even a hypothetical structure made entirely of aerogel, though I cannot imagine how we would fit the bill for such a thing." The scientist turned to Chara. "These designs are far more complex than the Prince or you could ever design. The kind of arrogance I've been seeing more and more often in you is concerning. You are just a laboratory assistant. Do not forget that."
Chara turned scarlet, whether it was from the chastisement or from the subtle undertones of concern he found himself immediately latching onto was impossible to tell. "Spare me your fatherly lectures," Chara muttered, begrudgingly following Gaster out of his office as the scientist stood up to leave. "So, what are we doing today? Distillation? Electrolyzation? General Testing? We wouldn't need anyone else for the last one, and I'm pretty good at running the electrolyte tests on the vitality fluid at this point. What about extraction? I know we did that only two weeks ago, but hear me out: I feel good enough t-"
"No." Gaster's words dripped with ice. "I signed a contract with the King and Queen that I intend to adhere to completely. We will never extract anything from your SOUL more than once a month in a facility where your surrogate parents are not present." Chara flushed once again. "And in regards to your first question, the head of the physics department has constructed a device that runs on Justice. I am going to use it to show you something I've been putting off for far too long now."
"Justice?"
"You are aware that the vitality of your SOUL is a heterogeneous solution, correct?"
"Well, yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?"
Gaster folded his arms behind his back, and Chara had to hurry to ensure he wasn't outpaced by the long-legged scientist.
"Justice is one of the constituents of your SOUL." A soft giggle escaped Chara, and Gaster stiffened at the noise. "Don't ask me why it's called that - Bettie was the one who first noticed it and she felt the need to get a little bit poetic during the naming process." The pair's hollow, quiet footsteps echoed down the hallways. A forgotten radio, turned down so low it was clear nobody had really been listening to it for a long time, mumbled in the lobby. The urge to ask once again where they were going burned at the tip of Chara's tongue as they turned down a darkened corridor. Gaster had never taken him to this part of the CORE before.
"I mean, that's cool, but how does 'Justice' relate to the machine you're taking me to see?" The walls around Chara grew slick with darkness, but Gaster made no move to flick on the light switch. Swallowing his rising discomfort, Chara absently chewed on his fingernails and focused all his attention on the slim figure in front of him.
"It has very interesting metaphysical properties, and by using a derivative of PCR we were able to replicate vast quantities of it. Someone had the idea to use Justice as a battery acid for a transportation machine - it's a fantastic conductor of electricity and also has a frighteningly low pH, so the notion was understandable - and ended up altering the functionality of the aforementioned machine. It's the most fascinating thing."
"What does it do?"
"You'll see." The scientist stopped moving and halted in front of what looked like a door. It was impossible to tell in the darkness, and the pathetic glow of the authentication keypad did little to help. "I need you to close your eyes."
"Close my eyes? What's going on? Is this supposed to be some sort of surprise?"
"Do as I say and you might keep your retinas."
Chara rolled his eyes, and, in a sudden rush of obstinacy, kept his eyes trained on Gaster's slim, backlighted form. The telltale ping of a recognized keycard and the familiar swish of automatic doors were the last things Chara processed before his vision flared and failed. He heard himself scream and heard his body slap onto the floor. It was bright, it was so so bright, it was so bright that the whole world was yellow and black and white and red and red and oh gosh he couldn't see anything anymore he was blind he was blind he wa-
"Perhaps you would have been a better actor than scientist," Gaster cooly commented.
"Shut up! You blinded me! You did it on purpose! I can't see - I can't see, and it's all your fault!"
"Please, that's enough theatrics. Your sight will be back in a few minutes." The even tap of Gaster's feet receded into the hallway.
"Where are you going! Wait! Gaster! I can't see!"
"Count to one hundred. I'll be back before then, and so will your vision."
The air felt cold and stale to Chara's lungs. The blood pulsating behind his gums cooled rapidly in contact with the frigid air and sent sparks of pain up to his brain. Oh, Angel have mercy. He counted slowly, rocking himself from the balls of his heels to the hams of his rear as he did. Slowly the corners of his vision came back, and the void was replaced with a dark, eerie green. Light shone from behind him, and he could hear Gaster approaching from behind.
"Get up and turn around."
Chara did as instructed, and the last vestiges of shock and fear dissipated from his bloodstream. In front of him stood a massive, star-shaped contraption that poured cascades of canary-yellow light onto the floor.
"What is that?"
Gaster gave Chara a smug look. "A warp machine. Of course, it has a more elaborate, professional name, but I'll keep things simple for your sake." The human barely registered the sarcastic quip and reverently took a step forward. His fingernails reflected the bright, yellow light and his eyelashes turned golden.
"What does it do?"
"You'll see." There was the faint sound of shuffling, and Chara felt something small and moist being pressed into his hand. Justifiably confused, Chara looked down at the item Gaster was trying to pawn off to him. It was...an apple slice?
"..?"
"Hold this. You'll see why in just a moment. Take note that the apple's flesh hasn't oxidized yet." With a grandiose flourish, Gaster pulled open the door of the Warp Machine and ushered Chara inside. The machine thrummed and shook, doing its best to knock the scientist and his assistant off their feet, and pinged happily when Gaster pressed his keycard to the control panel.
And they blinked out of existence.
Chara's mind was silent as his consciousness hurled through the void. There were glimpses of thoughts, fragments of mental narration, but it never amounted to anything cohesive. He was alive but not living. At first he struggled to keep his mind awake, to keep himself chatting and thinking and ruminating to himself, but the desire slipped away. He felt nothing, saw nothing, was nothing, and found no qualms with his new state of being.
He was a little disappointed when reality recreated itself around him, even more so when he felt the cool, icy draft wafting between the Warp Machine's metal sides. Gaster picked himself up off the machine's floor (both of them had found themselves face-down and bottoms up when they'd regained consciousness) and opened the door. In front of them, a brilliant, virgin sheet of snow stretched as far as the eye could see.
Chara looked down at the apple in his hand. The once-white flesh was mottled and yellow: in the few seconds that the machine had been bending and twisting the fabric of reality, the apple slice had oxidized.
"What happened?" Chara questioned. Apple juice clung to the small dips and grooves in his fingers and grew sticky in the cool, snowy air.
"First of all, do you know where we are?"
Dark eyes looked up from the yellow apple slice to the winter wonderland outside. Chara got to his feet and hopped out of the machine, fitting his feet into the snowy footprints Gaster left behind.
"Snowdin."
"That's correct. Now, do you know what we just did?"
"We teleported?"
"Not exactly. Look at the apple in your hand," Gaster's voice was hard and crisp, void of any of its earlier warmth. Perhaps the chilly, indifferent air around them had settled into the Royal Scientists' hollow bones.
"What kind of game is this? The apple isn't going to give me the answer. It oxidized, great, cool, what is that supposed to mean?" Chara stifled the urge to toss the little scrap of fruit into the snow. Wet slush snuck through the space between his boot's sole and heel, and his socks grew damp. Not conducive to an amicable attitude, that was for sure. The human picked at the yellowed flesh and let little bits of it settle into the snow. His eyes slowly crept up into his hairline as he thought. "Wait...this is...it takes time for the apple to turn yellow. Did the machine just take us from the CORE to Snowdin and knock us out in the meantime?"
The faintest, vaguest ghost of a smile flitted across Gaster's face.
"Something along those lines. The Warp Machine, with the help of the Justice in its battery, was able to manipulate both space and time. Only to a very, very small extent, of course, but it essentially enabled the machine to teleport us to Snowdin. In a roundabout way, however. It wasn't instantaneous. I'd say about ten or so minutes have passed, judging only by how yellowed the apple is. Perhaps there are other constituents of your SOUL that would be more conducive to things such as time-travel and teleportation, but I believe Justice is more than suited for the experiments and machine's we've set up so far."
Snow collected on Chara's lashes. His breath came out in short, awed little puffs.
He'd done that.
His SOUL. His SOUL had made these things possible.
"Now," Gaster began, the mirth and admiration gone from his voice, "there is something I must show you. I've put this off for far too long."
Closing notes from the author: Hope you enjoyed! Got any questions or thoughts? Don't feel shy to leave 'em down below. :D I'll respond as soon as I'm able!