Alright! Sorry about the fourth chapter being put up late, I got caught up in a few things but here it is, a rare second chapter upload in a week! I think I'm going to stop announcing the amount of chapters before they actually begin since, you know... I think we all know this is the 4th chapter. It even says it in the dropdown menu for the chapters, heh. I won't waste anymore time. It's another long chapter and I hope you enjoy!

New Home

A tired, heavily out of breath, and injured Skyler slowly shambles his way through the ruins, his legs shaking a little with each step. There is a little bit of blood on his face along with a few cuts and bruises on his arms and legs as he just got out of a massive battle not long ago. He was attacked by a large group of monsters for seemingly no reason, being blamed for keeping them trapped in the ruins and breaking some sort of promise to free them. He never promised anyone anything and never said that he'd help them escape. If they were nicer, he would've definitely helped them if possible, but that isn't what happened. At least he managed to walk away with his life still in one piece, but he probably won't be able to live down what happened back there. It's not important anymore, for he's reached a crossroads in his path and has to choose where he'll go now. He could head north, or keep going straight, and he decides to go straight. He walks through a doorway and is greeted with an expansive aerial view of all the homes within the Ruins. He can't see any visible means of getting down to the ground from where he is, so it's a mystery as to how anyone gets back to their home to him. He eventually notices a small plastic toy knife sitting on the ground next to him on the left. Considering what had happened before, it would be wise to have something to use as a weapon in case more monsters show up to try and attack him. Even if it is a toy, he could find something to sharpen it on and turn it into an actual weapon, but for now, it'll do. He bends down and picks it up with his left hand. The plastic blade and handle feels almost brand new, and has no visible marks on it to indicate that someone else used it before. The knife is very dusty though. He blows on it to remove the dust and coughs a few times as he accidentally inhales some of the dust, taking another look at it now that it's dust free. "If those irritating monsters show up, perhaps I can intimidate them with this. I really don't want to, but if I must… then I will." he silently says to himself before putting it in the front left pocket of his hoodie. He swaps his phone out in the process and keeps it in his right front pocket instead. He's left-handed and having his 'weapon' closer to his main hand is a much safer bet than reaching over to grab it and risk being hurt. He leaves as there's nothing else of interest here and heads north after coming back to the crossroads. A small house comes into view with a large tree whose red leaves have fallen off all its branches planted in front of it. He takes a deep breath, he can finally take a rest, recover, and maybe eat some chocolate after the rather difficult and energy eating battle he won. Right before he takes a shaky step forward, he hears a familiar voice.

"Oh dear, that took much longer than I thought it would." The voice belongs to Toriel, and while she tries to dial out his phone number, she walks around the tree to see him standing there. She's quite surprised to see that he got this far and runs up to him, worried. "How did you get here, my child? Are you hurt?" She kneels down on her right leg and notices the blood, cuts, and bruises on him. Her right paw tightens up into a fist for a moment, but she keeps her cool. "Who did this to you? I will force them to apologize for what they've done." She gently lifts her right paw and places it against one of the cuts on his face, it's still bleeding slightly. "There, there… I'll heal your wounds…" She lifts her paw off of his face and her palm takes on a warm, green glow and using her magic, she heals the wounds on his body, the wounds themselves and all the blood on him disappearing rapidly in the process. He looks as if he never got into a battle in the first place. Even he's surprised by this and his mouth opens slightly in wonder along with a surprised look on his face accompanying it. She sighs, her eyes closing a little bit with a frown to boot, disappointed in herself for not protecting him better. "I should not have left you alone for so long knowing that the monsters here have become quite violent and hostile. It was irresponsible to try and surprise you by brushing aside the potential consequences of my actions." This makes his face lighten up, curious to know what this 'surprise' was supposed to be and she realizes that the jig is up. "Err… I suppose I cannot hide it any longer after saying such a thing." Her frown disappears and her eyes open up. "Come, small one!" she walks towards the house behind her. He walks towards the house too, no longer shambling or limping about thanks to being healed, but stops when he notices a SAVE point just outside the door to her house. He decides to use it and just like before, that text box appears showing everything he's saving… however, something is different this time.

"Skyler. LV 4. Time: 55:01. Ruins - Home. File saved."

His first save showed that he was LV 1, whatever that meant. Now, he's LV 4. He's not sure what LV could mean or what the number represents, so he simply moves on and pays it no attention, completely unaware of the fact that it represents something quite sinister. He stands just outside the door and looks up at the cozy, little home that she lives in. There's a sign over the door but the symbols are faded and impossible to read, a couple piles of red leaves near the door, and a rather interestingly sweet smell is wafting through the air. This smell entices him to go in as he cannot resist sweet treats and upon walking in, the smell becomes extremely profound and she stands in the middle of the front foyer. The foyer itself isn't that special. The floor is lined with light wooden planks and the walls are a beige color. Behind her is a staircase leading to the basement surrounded by a sturdy, dark wooden railing. In the northern right corner of the room is a little table with a plant on it, and in the northern left corner is a small shelf with books on it. Everything about this house so far says. "Welcome! Relax and stay a while!" and couldn't be any cozier if it tried.

She's quite excited to tell him something, a wide smile on her face. "Do you smell that?" She throws her paws up in the air with excitement. "Surprise!" Her paws fall back down in front of her stomach. "It is a butterscotch-cinnamon pie. I made it with the thought that we might celebrate your arrival. I want you to have a nice time living here, so I will hold off on snail pie for tonight. Here Skyler, I have another surprise for you." She walks down the hall on the right side of the room and he follows her, stopping a few feet away from the first door in the hall. "This is it…" She reaches out and gently grabs his left hand, guiding him towards the first door. "A room of your own. I hope you like it!" She places her left paw on his head and gently rubs it for a couple of seconds before the smell of something burning catches her attention. "Is something burning…? Um, make yourself at home!" She then quickly runs back towards the foyer and into the kitchen to tend to that, leaving him to his own whims. He's quite tired from the battle he had earlier and a quick nap sounds like a good idea to him. He grabs the doorknob with his left hand, turns it, and the door opens for him to enter. The room has the appearance of a child's bedroom and looks to have been recently tidied up. The bed, surprisingly, is big enough for him despite everything else in the room looking like it's meant for a kid. In front of the bed is a chest, and when he walks up to it to open it, it's revealed to have a bunch of interesting children's toys kept inside. He isn't very interested in them as he's an adult, but in his mind, he does find them a bit endearing to a certain extent and could see himself playing with them if he was 10-13 years younger. To the right of the bed is a couple cute stuffed animals and a tall lamp emitting a warm orangey-yellow glow. Just looking at it makes him feel warm in its presence. To the left of the bed is a tall wardrobe with, as expected, a bunch of children's clothes inside. To his surprise, the shirts are all of a similar style with identical colors consisting of green with yellow stripes. Left of the wardrobe is a shelf with a dusty picture frame on it. Out of everything else in the room, this piques his interest the most. He walks over to it and picks it up with his left hand, not able to see if there's a picture inside due to all the dust on it. He takes a deep breath and blows on it to remove a gargantuan amount of dust, revealing nothing underneath. He puts it back where it belongs and looks at a small box to his left on the ground. He bends down to open it up with both hands and inside is a bunch of kids shoes in a variety of different sizes, none that look like they'd fit him. There isn't anything else in this room that can be commented on and though he's calmed down and relaxed quite a bit from the battle earlier, he's even more tired than before. He stands back up and takes his backpack off his back, walks over to and places it at the foot of the bed, gently takes both of his shoes off and places them to the right of his backpack, then climbs into the bed, further relaxing himself. The smell of butterscotch-cinnamon entices his tummy but it also has an interestingly curious power of slowly lulling him to sleep.

A few hours later, Skyler wakes up to the entire room being darker than he remembered before falling asleep. Putting aside the fact that someone, most likely Toriel, turned the lights out for him, he's feeling a whole lot better. Through the dimness of the room, he spots something on the floor in front of the bed. He stretches himself out towards whatever it is, and a strong smell of butterscotch-cinnamon hits him, making his eyes open excitedly in response to the stimuli. He rolls out of bed and sits in front of the cooled down yet ultra fresh slice of pie that he can only attribute to her since she said she made it to celebrate his arrival. Resisting his own temptations, he picks up the plate holding the pie along with a fork on it with both hands and stands up to leave the room since it wouldn't be the best idea to eat in the dark. To his surprise, the door leading out of the room is left open a crack with a miniscule amount of light peeking in, making it easy for him to use his right shoulder to push it open without having to put the plate on the ground to turn the knob and open it. He walks down the hall towards a room on the left side of the foyer and it opens up into a small dining room and living room combination. Near the bottom left corner of the room is a table with 3 chairs and a nice decorative plant on it. Interestingly, one of the 3 chairs is much bigger than the other 2. It makes him think that perhaps, before he arrived here, she was living with 2 other humans, monsters, or even a monster and a human. A short few feet away from there, Toriel herself is sitting in a large, comfy looking armchair reading a book next to a fireplace whose fire is extremely calm and controlled to the point that he thinks it might be possible for him to put his hand inside without burning it and she doesn't notice Skyler as she's too into the book she's reading. On the right side of the fireplace is a large bookshelf and a rack of fireplace tools. From where he's standing, he can see that the sharp edges of the tools have been filed down, perhaps to prevent any children from hurting themselves with it lest they decide to play with them unsupervised. He can see past where she's sitting that there's another room and his curiosity tells him to go in there, but before he does, he first places the plate of pie on the table for later and then walks towards said room. He's welcomed into a small but tidy kitchen that's simple on the eyes. A large refrigerator is in the upper left corner of the room and he decides to take a look inside, opening it up to see quite a few drinks and food items, but what captures his attention the most is a name-brand chocolate bar that he recognizes. As a matter of fact, this chocolate bar is the same exact one that he enjoys the most, his favorite. He notices that, for some reason, the design of the logo on this name-brand chocolate is vastly different to the ones he has in his backpack, and his open eyes widen slightly when he grabs it with his right hand and reads the expiration date on the back of the packaging. The chocolate bar is just over 16 years old! There's no way he could possibly eat this, it's so expired that opening it might unleash some unknown monster on both human AND monsterkind! He places it back in the same exact spot it was in before he touched it and looks at whatever else is in there. He recognizes milk, eggs, butter, cooking dough, juice, water, and a few various veggies like carrots, lettuce, and broccoli. He closes the fridge and looks at the sink on the right, noticing a small amount of white fur in the drain along with a bowl and a few food preparing utensils like a whisk and funnel. Just above the sink is a hanging rack for pans and oven mitts, which the entire rack is full of. Below the rack, a drainboard filled with cookie cutters, plates, bowls, forks and spoons, but to his wide-eyed surprised, no knives. He looks all over the drainboard and even on the counter where it sits but he doesn't find a single knife there, he even looks in the cabinets below the counter to see if he can find anything. He finds absolutely nothing and it prompts his right eyebrow to raise on his confused face along with him silently uttering out the following sentence. "Where are the knives?" He notices right next to the drainboard a few feet away is the pie she had baked for him with a slice missing from it. He raises that eyebrow even further and his eyes take on a chinked, suspicious look. "How the hell can she cut a slice of pie out without any knives?" he continues to look, opening the drawers to find not a single knife anywhere. He quickly realizes looking for knives is a futile decision so he stops and focuses on the pie itself. He can't grasp the size of this butterscotch-cinnamon pie, it's massive. Was she making a pie for just the two of them or was she making a pie for an entire village because it's big enough for a small village to eat and still have some left over! The sheer size actually intimidates him slightly and while he really wants to take more, he feels it would be wrong to do, and even if he could, there's no knives for him to use to cut a slice with. The only other thing of interest in the kitchen is the stove, and surprisingly, the stove looks like it's never been used in however many years it's been here. The stovetop is completely clean and looking through the plastic window to see the inside of the oven reveals the inside to be just as, if not cleaner than the stovetop. She must use some sort of fire magic to cook instead of the stove, but then why have a stove at all when she can use fire magic is what he questions but doesn't get any answer. There isn't anything else in this kitchen so he leaves and decides to check out the other rooms in the hall where his room is. He walks past Toriel and for some reason, the left corner of his eye catches a single book on her bookshelf that appears slightly out of place. It grabs his attention and he goes over to it and looks at it. Turns out, this book is a history book and is titled. "History of the Underground" and he decides to grab it with his right hand and open it up to a random page and reads it silently to himself. "Trapped behind the barrier and fearful of further human attacks, we retreated far. Far into the earth we walked and eventually, we walked until we couldn't walk anymore, reaching the cavern's end. This was our new home, which we named 'Home'. As great as the king is, he's pretty lousy at names…" The book shed some light on why this place is filled with monsters, but he's interested about the barrier since it sounds like something that he's going to eventually need to take into consideration while trying to exit the Underground. A few questions rise in his head with no answers and dwelling on them would simply be a waste of time. He puts the book back on the shelf with his right hand and walks through the foyer into the hallway where the other rooms are. He walks past his room and goes to open the second door he finds, placing his right hand on the doorknob and turning it. The door opens and he goes inside and immediately realizes that this room has to be Toriel's room. Inside is a queen sized bed, a desk at the foot of said bed with a small, adorable chair, some papers and books on the desk with one book being open to a specific page, a bucket filled with something that appears to be alive and moving, a cactus, a bookcase with two golden flowers and another cactus on top to the right of her bed, and a dresser with a small lamp on it on the right side of the bookshelf. He checks the bucket first and what's inside makes him squirm in place a bit, utterly disgusted with what he found. In the bucket on the left side of the desk is a bunch of snails, used for what, he has no idea but he quickly moves away from that and onto the things on the desk. He takes a look at the open book which appears to be her diary open to a specific page with a small section circled in red marker and he reads it out loud to himself. "Why did the skeleton want a friend? Because she was feeling BONELY." He can't help but smirk at the joke and it causes him to remember the joke she told him earlier about shingles, which makes him giggle like a kid. He looks at the rest of the page and it's filled with a whole bunch of jokes similar to that one with nothing else interesting in particular. The bed itself is self-explanatory as well as the bookcase, but the dresser is a different story. He pulls one of the drawers open and is greeted to a large amount of socks. He wasn't expecting this and he simply closes the drawer slowly, wondering why Toriel, a monster, has a drawer full of socks in the first place.

He doesn't dwell in her room too long, for the pie that he left on the table earlier comes back to mind and he leaves her room, heading straight for the table in the living room to eat it when suddenly, a very strange and odd feeling overcomes him. For absolutely no reason in particular, he starts feeling gravely homesick, missing his own home even though there isn't too much for him back there. He even frowns and his eyes slightly drop closed in a sad manner. He looks over at Toriel, then the pie, and back to her before letting out a loud sigh that catches her attention and she addresses him. "Up already, I see?" She gently closes the book in her paws and lies it on its cover on her lap, looking at him. "Um, I want you to know how glad I am to have someone here. There are so many old books I want to share, I want to show you my favorite bug-hunting spot, and I've also prepared a curriculum for your education if you've never been to school. This might come as a surprise to you considering that I'm a monster… But I have always wanted to be a teacher." Her voice becomes quiet while her eyes squint a little as she realizes that it isn't that much of a surprise. "Actually, perhaps it isn't very surprising at all." she increases the volume of her voice again and her face returns to normal. "STILL, I am glad to have you living here." She notices that within his face, he looks like he wants something. "Oh, did you want something? What is it?" He wants to ask her about being able to go back to his real home, but he doesn't know how to say it and his eyes avert their gaze elsewhere as his cheeks flush up red a little. She looks down at the book she was reading for a brief moment. "Did you want to hear about the book I am reading? It is called '72 Uses for Snails.' Here's an interesting and exciting snail fact. Did you know that snails make terrible shoelaces? Interesting, right?" His slight anxious feeling turns into a split on whether to be disgusted or intrigued over the snail fact she told him. He nods in agreeance but simultaneously tries his best to hide his disgust and shys away from asking her about going home. She smiles in response. "Well, bother me if you need anything else." She grabs the book and opens it to pick up where she left off reading from, leaving him to do as he pleases. He really wants to ask her if he can go home, but just doesn't have the courage to do so and instead, walks over to the table and takes a seat in one of the smaller chairs to eat his pie. Right before he can grab his fork, she asks him a question. "Hey Skyler, I wanted to ask you something earlier, but I did not want to sound rude or nosy since we had only met moments before. Although thinking about it, it might still be somewhat rude to ask but I want to know anyway. Is there a reason for why you fell down into the Underground? If it is too personal a question, you do not have to answer me. I understand you might not want to share."

He's caught completely off guard by this question, his mouth becoming small and his eyes widening in response, not expecting her to ask a question like that. Truth be told, he isn't too happy about the reason for why he fell down into the Underground, even if it was by accident. He doesn't know if he should trust her with the REAL reason, so he simply says what happened for him to end up where he is now. "I… I accidentally fell down here." he looks down at the pie in front of him and he takes on a real look of sadness this time.

Her tone becomes inquisitive. "An accident? It's not everyday you hear about a human accidentally falling into the Underground. I am not sure of what's up there on the surface for you to have fallen down here, but I can only guess that maybe you tripped on something?"

His eyes partially close and his cheeks flush up, embarrassed but also ashamed of the real reason. "...yeah…"

"I see… Another thing as well, you like chocolate, don't you?"

His eyes widen completely, his pupils shrink, and his mouth drops open. How is it possible for her to know that he likes chocolate when this is the first time she's asked him about it. "I do… h-how'd you know?"

She chuckles quietly and her tone returns to being sweet and sincere. "Well, you see, whenever humans fall down here, strangely, I feel as if I have seen them before. I may or may not have also taken a quick look inside that backpack of yours while you were sleeping." her eyes widen a little in response to a somewhat unhappy look he gives her upon hearing that. "I hope you do not mind, I was just making sure you did not have anything that you could hurt yourself with accidentally…" He doesn't care too much, but the thought of her going through his stuff does slightly upset him and it shows. "I am sorry, but since I am taking care of you, it is my responsibility to make sure you do not end up hurting yourself with anything that you might have. I would feel really bad if you hurt yourself by accident."

He understands and nods to show. Accidentally hurt himself, she has no idea of the toy knife he has in the left pocket of his hoodie. It's tucked away far enough that he'd have to take it out for her to see it. "Y-you could've just asked you know…"

She decides to change the subject. "ANYWAY. I hope you like your new home, little one. I can not wait for all the amazing memories that we will make together here."

These words somehow instill the confidence he needs to ask her what he wanted to ask her earlier, and without thinking, he blurts it out. "Toriel, when can I go back home?"

She looks up from her book, confused on what he means by that. "What? Home? This… this IS your home now." She then notices the very strong look he has on his face and she immediately knows what he means from that alone. She closes the book with a loud thud unlike last time, takes a deep breath in and out, places the book on one of the arms of her chair and stands up. "... I have to do something. Stay here. Do not follow me." She hastily makes her way out of the room and into the foyer, disappearing from sight. Skyler quickly looks for something to wrap the pie up with, heading into the kitchen where he finds some cellophane wrap in the cabinet below the sink. He uses that to wrap up the pie and he runs to his room to put it in his backpack. While in there, he quickly puts his shoes on, tying them tightly, and fitting the backpack around his shoulders on his back before coming out and taking a long look at the staircase leading to the basement in the foyer, the only place he didn't check after waking up. His eyes close and his face becomes plain and blank. If she doesn't want him following her down there, then it's obvious that her basement leads to a way out of the Ruins and into the rest of the Underground. Only one thing remains, to get past her and find a way out of the Underground.

What's gonna happen...? What's gonna be Skyler and Toriel's fate...? Does his LV increasing from 1 to 4 change anything? Find out next time on Dragon Ba- LOL NAH, HOPE YOU ENJOYED AND I'LL SEEYA NEXT CHAPTER!