Prologue
The creators of project SA-N5 are without a doubt the three most underappreciated and most undeservedly overlooked monsters in the entire underground. Yes, they do all inhabit a position that most others in their field can only lust after in dreams, and yes, they do earn an insane amount of money. But what good do money and prestige do if they can't even get you allowance to work on one of the rarest resources of monsterkind? Blueprints of human souls, that is the most they can ever hope for. Apparently one has to be a Royal Scientist in order to even look at the actual souls. And the three Assisting Royal Scientists, as it is, are sat in their laboratory. Bored out of their enormous minds.
They are also most definitely not wallowing in self-pity, thank you very much.
Boredom, as is generally known, can lead to rather questionable actions. Much in the same nature one might start tossing peanuts into a sleeping colleague's open mouth, the three scientists begin tossing ideas ‒ mainly for the frustrating lack of peanuts and sleeping colleagues.
Dr. Pollard is the first to start scribbling schematics on the chalkboard, twitching cat ears clearly giving away his eagerness to prove his worth to Dr.-grand-and-brilliant-and-almost-definitely-not-the-least-bit-scary-Royal-Scientist-Wingding-Gaster.
Dr. Grynn is the one to snatch the chalk from his fingers, her wide grin nearly splitting her face in half in her absolute glee over a project not supervised by Dr.-holier-than-thou-I-can-touch-human-souls-Royal-Scientist-Wingding-Gaster.
Dr. Freeda is the last to join them at the chalkboard, if only because her knees are acting up again. But somebody has to keep these children from burning down the lab, and Dr.-whoops-apparently-that's-explosive-Wingding-Gaster sure as hell isn't going to do it.
Creating a human soul from scratch is of course just idle fantasy, though they do quite enjoy indulging in it for a while. With motivation as well as boredom slowly dissipating over the weeks however, the project's goals are necessarily tweaked to something slightly less daft.
Project Human Soul - Number 1 swiftly becomes project Human Soul (Artificial) - Number 2.
Which becomes project Soul (Artificial) Number 3.
And then SA-N4.
By the time they are fiddling with Project SA-N5, they are all right back to being the most underappreciated and disregarded monsters in the entire universe and neither money nor prestige are worth anything if you're constantly overworked, your boss is kind of crazy and your one singular pet-project is ‒ actually rather unimpressive.
It's really time to just finish the damn thing and move on to something more interesting.
I'm also posting this on AO3 and tumblr. No idea how to put a link here, but my username for both sites is uncannycookie.