Frisk was hyper aware of everything around them in that moment. The smell of the flowers, so intense that they could almost taste it. The golden glow reflecting off the petals that they knew only they could see. Chara's stunned silence, and their slightly chilly presence hanging over their shoulder.

A SAVE point.

There was a SAVE point. Here. On the surface.

They had never found one on the surface. Never, not in any of the almost two thousand runs that they'd lived through. The SAVE points only ever appeared in the Underground.

But here was one now. Right in front of them. Complete even with the odd sensation that seemed to surround every one of them like an aura – a shivering, gut-wrenching tremor, and a strange warping of the world around it that you could feel but never see.

A SAVE point. I can SAVE. We can SAVE!

Euphoria bloomed in their chest - then a prickling feeling on the back of their neck reminded them that there were two people watching them, including someone with a doctorate in psychology, someone who'd read them like a book, and they quickly stomped down on the emotion, smothering it.

Bad! They scolded themselves. You can't forget something like that!

Still, it was hard, to not just melt from sheer relieved glee, right then and there. It had been almost a year and a half since they'd last SAVED – just before they'd left Ebott to begin their extended trip around the world – and they'd thought they'd have to wait until they got back to America, an estimated three years later, before they got another chance. Three years of watching their every step, of overwhelming paranoia that something would happen, and they'd be one Reset closer to waking up in a yellow flowerbed in the Underground with their mind all skewed and wrong.

And, what with HuRg and the near assassination of Dublin's mayor, it had started looking more and more that it would be here in Ireland that the luck they'd managed to keep ahold of would finally run out.

It might still run out. It would run out, they were sure of it.

Which meant that even though there were two pairs of eyes on them, they couldn't pass this up. They had to SAVE. They might not get another chance.

Slowly, cautiously, they took a step, then a few more, letting their feet bring them up to the edge of the rose spiral.

"Wow," they breathed, hoping fervently that they didn't sound too happy all of a sudden – hardly anyone had mood swings just like that, and the people that did were generally unstable, and they did not want the boys questioning their sanity, or anything at all, right now. "These are beautiful."

They glanced at the Fowl twins out of the corner of their eyes and saw Beckett puff up his chest in pride. Myles was still watching Frisk themselves, however, so they quickly averted their eyes. Let's not give him anymore reasons to exercise that brain of his yet.

They knelt down to study a rose close up – they needed to look like they were appreciating the blooms. Which they did – the flowers really were spectacular – though not as much as they did the glowing golden salvation hovering at the spiral's center.

"What kind of roses are these?" They asked. "I've never seen ones with orange petals before."

One of the boys hmmed thoughtfully.

"You know, we really don't know," Beckett mused. "Most people around here just call them fairy roses."

"They may be some variation of Mister Lincoln roses," his brother suggested. "If I am remembering correctly, they are significantly larger than many other rose species."

"Shouldn't your gardener know what sort of roses they are? I mean, if the gardener you have now is the one that planted them…?"

The twins lapsed into silence for several long moments. Frisk meandered a few steps closer to the center of the spiral before risking another sidelong glance back at them, in time to see what could only be called a silent conversation – Beckett cast Myles a quizzical and slightly pleading glance, which the other boy responded to with a deadpan look, which was countered by an even more pleading glance plus a pair of skeptical raised eyebrows, and so on and so forth.

Must be a sibling thing. I've seen Sans and Pap have conversations like that before.

Finally, whatever psychic argument the boys had been having was apparently settled, and when they turned back to Frisk, Beckett had a tiny smile on his face.

"The thing is," he whispered conspiratorially, "nobody knows who planted them!"

Frisk stopped and looked at him with genuine surprise. "What do you mean nobody?"

"Nobody ever admitted to planting them! They just started growing one day, a couple months after the Crash, and no-one knew who did it!"

"That's the main reason the locals took to calling them fairy roses," Myles added reluctantly. "During the Crash, many people claimed to have sighted small fairy-like beings, and the roses began to bloom at the height of the rumors concerning said sightings."

"That, and they appeared from nowhere," Beckett stressed. "Like fairy circles, out of the old stories!"

They appeared from nowhere, right after the Crash, Frisk mused, carefully advancing farther towards the center of the spiral. I wonder… did the SAVE point have anything to do with that?

The SAVE points in the Underground had never seen to affect their surroundings all that much, save for that odd warpage. It was almost as if they didn't actually exist except to Frisk, and nothing else could interact with them.

However, that had been in the Underground. The rules might be different up here.

Though if that were the case, and the flowers had been caused by the SAVE point, then that meant that said SAVE point had only appeared sometime during or after the Crash. Which didn't sound normal at all, because they weren't supposed to just appear like that…

Right?

*You can ask Sans about it later! Hurry up and SAVE!

Frisk blinked as Chara finally spoke up, realizing that they were only a few feet away from their glowing golden lifeline. They'd still been walking while they were thinking.

"That's a little odd," they said, weakly.

"Mmm-hmm!" Beckett agreed. "But in a cool sort of way!"

"Definitely," Frisk agreed. "I mean, who knows, maybe this means that fairies are real or something. I mean, monsters are real, right? Why wouldn't fairies be?"

They took a couple more steps, and knelt down, reaching out gingerly as if to touch one Bravery-orange bloom –

The world twisted, colors and sounds and smells glitching furiously in a maelstrom of chaotic paradoxes, and then settled again, the sensations of the world becoming that much sharper as reality solidified again.

*The realization that you can stave off another Reset for that much longer… it fills you with Determination!

Frisk grinned triumphantly, finishing their reach to gently touch a petal.

Safe. This timeline's safe!

For now. The SAVE points didn't last forever. Frisk had found that out the hard way – by dying over and over again until, when they blindly reached out to LOAD, they found themselves waking back up in the Ruins again, right back at the beginning.

The longest number of LOADS they'd ever gotten from a single point had been a hundred and fifty, and that had been in the Judgement Hall, during the Genocide run…

No, don't think about that. You've SAVED, that's not going to happen yet, you've got time!

How much time, they didn't know.

Wiping the smile from their face and putting on a calmer expression – the face of someone still jittery with nerves, but not as much as they had been before – they turned to face the Fowl twins again.

"Thank you for showing me these," they said, meekly. "You're right, this is definitely the best place in the gardens."

Beckett beamed, innocently ignorant to the space-time shenanigans that had happened right in front of his nose. Myles, too, seemed to not have noticed anything – at least, the level of scrutiny he'd been giving the ambassador hadn't changed, and he didn't look suspicious.

That didn't actually mean that he hadn't seen anything, though.

"If you say so," Myles said after a second, a bit dubiously. "I honestly prefer the barn."

"You only like the barn because that's where Artemis was working on that plane of his!" Beckett accused his sibling, scowling playfully.

"You have a barn?" Frisk asked, taking advantage of the subject change to hopefully distract the boys from anything odd they may or may not have just witnessed. "What would you need a barn for?"

"We don't need a barn for anything, though we use it as a workshop for larger projects and a place to store our carriage," Myles corrected them. "However, the manor was originally a castle, built by one of our distant ancestors during the Crusades, so a barn would have been necessary to house livestock, in case of famine or siege..."

"Show off!" Beckett snickered.

"Can I see it?" Frisk asked. "I mean, if it's basically a workshop now, that sounds cool!"

"Well, I guess, but it doesn't look anything too special." Beckett gestured for them to follow, and they did, quickly navigating their way out of the rose spiral and following the boys as they led them back across the garden. "It's just a barn – Artemis didn't change anything inside, and Myles hasn't worked on any big projects for a while now..."

As the boy kept talking, Frisk took one last glance over their shoulder in time to see the point of yellow light disappear behind a corner of the manor.


After that, the remainder of the tour seemed to pass by very quickly. Frisk was shown the barn, which was, in fact, a barn, though a barn severely lacking in farming equipment and packed with odd metal bits that were, apparently, leftovers from one of Myles' bioengineering projects, some sort of life-support and diagnostic system, several months back. ("I finished the prototype months ago," the boy had said matter-of-factly, "and have tested it on several animals and found it to work well and without harm to the users or the 'patients'. Now it's simply a matter of waiting for human volunteers...") Then they were shown the pond outside the barn, which apparently glowed like hellfire at certain times of the day, several more flowerbeds, and a small corner of the grounds where several peacocks were nestled away from the hustle of activity indoors, where they managed to get close enough to pet one.

Then the boys were called away back inside by their mother, and Frisk was left on their own until they wandered back inside to check on all the monsters again. They picked their way through the lessening crowds – apparently some guests had decided to leave while they were gone – and spoke to every monster they could find. Not one weapon had been pulled, nor any insults thrown – not even at Muffet, who was still looking very smug at her table – and most of the remaining human attendees had been very polite.

The only one who hadn't, apparently, was Juliet, who had used the Fowl twins' absence to trade less-than-kid-friendly stories with the former royal guard. By the time Frisk managed to drag themselves away again (making the excuse that they needed to check in with Toriel), the two were already making plans to meet up at a local gym on one of and do some light sparring – which, knowing Undyne, would mean wrecking all of the equipment in said gym, and possibly breaking the windows.

Hopefully the poor building would still be standing afterward. Frisk didn't think the Fowls would be too happy about having to pay for the construction of a new one.

They found Toriel nodding and waving farewells to several human guests leaving for the night near the front hall. She seemed tired, but otherwise okay, if her smile upon seeing them was any indication.

"Hello, Frisk! How was the tour?"

They smiled back. "Great," they said honestly. "The gardens are really cool – they've got peacocks and water features and some exotic flowers out there! They've even got some they call fairy roses – they're these huge roses that are bright orange!" They grinned even wider, and shot their adoptive mother a wink. "They're fairy pretty!"

Toriel chuckled. "Shall I grant you some brownie points for a pun well done?"

Frisk snickered.

"What about the Fowl children?" Toriel continued. "I trust they treated you well?"

The ambassador nodded. Apart from that little hey-I-read-you-like-a-book thing.

"Good, good." The Queen stretched, then sighed. "I am afraid I have not have had quite so fun a time as you, my child. Many of the guests here were quite curious about a… certain someone back home."

Frisk winced. Toriel and Asgore had managed to reconcile somewhat, in the several months that the American government had forced the monsters to remain underground, but they were still on thin ice, and the matter wasn't helped any by the old king having to stay under Mt. Ebott until the humans deemed him trustworthy. That had probably upset Toriel more than anything else, and someone bringing it up in conversation… well, the less said the better.

"Apart from that, many of the humans here are very nice, if a bit formal," Toriel continued. "They have had many interesting questions for me and the other monsters – oh! Hello, sir!"

Frisk looked up at the human that had just approached them – a balding, elderly man, who they vaguely recognized as a politician they'd seen on the news once maybe a couple of weeks ago.

"Hello, Your Majesty," the man said, bowing his head to Toriel and completely ignoring Frisk. "I assume you've been doing well?"

Frisk stood there awkwardly as the man began pestering Toriel with questions. Well, maybe not pestering, not exactly – he did have a lot of questions, but Toriel didn't seem particularly bothered by them.

Finally, after a long five minutes of conversation, the man finally said "I understand that you're working on the fostering program suggested to the mayor, yes? How is that coming along?"

Frisk took the opportunity to speak up, just a little fed up with the way the man was ignoring them. "It's coming along pretty well, actually. We've already interviewed all of the original volunteers and narrowed them down to the people who would actually be able to successfully foster a mon –"

The man shot them an imperious glare, and the ambassador's voice trailed off.

"I did not ask you, little girl," he said flatly. "The Queen needs no proxy to speak of what she's been doing, yes?"

Toriel bristled, and Chara growled over Frisk's shoulder, but before either of them could react, a new voice interrupted the conversation.

"With all due respect, Mr. Yew, from my knowledge, the Queen has actually had little involvement with the developments involving the fostering."

Frisk nearly leaped out of their skin, and Chara yelped.

*Where they hell did he come from?!

The young man standing a few scant yards behind them had, indeed, seemed to have appeared out of nowhere, his black suited and black haired form just melting right out of the crowds.

"Ah," the now-named Mr. Yew said. "An honest mistake, I'm sure."

The newcomer's sharp blue eyes narrowed. "Hardly an innocent mistake, considering that it is already well-known and very public knowledge how active the monsters' young Ambassador is, that they were the one to suggest the measures taken to ensure the monsters' safety whilst dwelling in the same building as a human family, and that they were the one to actually perform each interview and vett the volunteers afterwards. As I understand it," here he turned to Frisk, raising an eyebrow, "you are also working on personally matching each monster to a human family you believe to be a match to their personality and needs, isn't that correct, Ambassador?"

Frisk nodded in confirmation, even as Mr. Yew's face began to pale rapidly.

"Surely you jest!" The politician blustered. "A mere child can't have done all that!"

The air seemed to grow cold, and the man took a step back, face blanching even further, as an intense glare was turned on him.

"I am sure I have no need to tell you who I am, yes?" The man's voice was cold, too, every syllable as sharp and precise as a diamond-edged scalpel. "After all, before your current profession, you were one of my father's business partners, and you spent much of your time in this very manor. I am sure you have seen what my younger brothers are capable of, and you have certainly had the chance to hear, from them, what I was capable of as a mere child." He leaned forward. "Need I remind you of just what I was capable of, and what I still am capable of?"

* "My younger brothers?" "My father's?" What?

Frisk's jaw dropped. No way. There's no way.

Now sweating profusely, the politician backed off, let out a trembling apology and an "I have places to be, excuse me," and fled back into the safety of the crowds. The man watched him go for a moment, then turned to the astonished ambassador.

"I apologize for that, Ambassador. Had my parents known of his personality shortcomings, I doubt they would have invited him."

"I-It's fine," Frisk stammered. "I've gotten worse than that. Um, a-are – I mean, are you…?"

The man's expression turned into subtle amusement.

"It would seem my reputation has proceeded me yet again," he said wryly, offering one outstretched hand for a handshake. "It is a pleasure to finally meet you in person, Ambassador Frisk. I am Artemis Fowl II."


And with this chapter, FRISK HAS OFFICIALLY MET ARTEMIS IN PERSON FOR THE FIRST TIME! Hope I did it justice!

And yes, I'm uploading this chapter a little early for you guys - I'm going on a day-long trip tomorrow, and I'm not sure if I'll be back in time to post the chapter in a timely manner, so early Saturday upload it is! Happy reading and enjoy the cliffhanger! :D