Feel free to vote for any one of these titles below! Since nobody's told me otherwise, this is the last chapter for people to vote on a series title!

The Magic of Souls (1)
Tales of Monsters, Humans, and Fairies (1)
Fairies and Monsters Gone Fowl (7)
Stories About Fairies, Monsters, and Two Bizarre Humans
Fairytales (16)
Temporal Dynamics for the Magically Inclined (20)
Okay Flowey, Stop Traumatizing the Fairies (10)
Underground Fairies
A Fairy Strange Crossover

Thank you for voting!


Four days. It had been four days since the kid had been kidnapped, and there had yet to be any sign of them.

Now, Sans considered himself a very patient monster. He was good at waiting, indefinitely if need be, for someone else to make a move – especially if that someone else was a certain human anomaly in the timestream. But four days? That was a very long time for anyone to wait, even for him – and it was an especially long time to wait when you had knowledge of Frisk's… abilities.

What was taking them so long? The kid had dealt with kidnappings before, in previous timelines. It should've only taken them a couple of days to find out whatever they needed to find out about their kidnappers, and then initiate a LOAD to take them back to before the kidnapping. Frisk and their ghostly hitchhiker were astonishingly good at reading people, and tricking them into spilling their guts, and they wouldn't stick around once they had what they needed, not when the monsters were waiting for them. He was certain of that.

… Almost certain. He'd been wrong about the kid before.

Still, four days. Four days of waiting with Papyrus and Tori and Alphys for any kind of news, four days of keeping an eye-socket on the weed to make sure he didn't disappear to go murder some unfortunate human in a back alley somewhere or something. Four days, and no sign of the kid.

Not that they hadn't looked. The Dublin police had been scouring the city for days, working their way from the warehouses near the docks to further inland. They'd been very thorough – not that they could be anything else, with Undyne amongst them. Undyne had no qualms about kicking down locked doors that the humans may have overlooked, and Sans wouldn't have been entirely surprised if the fish-lady had been running on pure adrenaline these past few days. He sure as hell hadn't seen her sleeping.

He hadn't really been sleeping, either. It was a full-time job keeping the weed in check – how the hell did the kiddo manage to keep him in line so easily? – and his brother and the others needed someone to talk to. Pap and Tori especially were looking more and more devastated as time moved on.

In the chair next to him, Tori took in a shuddering breath as a police officer entered the room, face as grim as every other time an officer had approached them.

"Any luck, Officer Clark?" Her voice trembled just as much as the breath she'd taken in, with a touch of fragile hope in every syllable.

It's not good, Sans couldn't help but think, that we've been to the police station often enough to know the officers by name.

The human grimaced and shook his head. "Nothing concrete yet, Your Majesty. We're still looking. Whoever these people are, they've been very thorough. Not a peep about your kid anywhere."

Toriel sagged in her chair, her impeccable posture dipping into a disheartened slouch for a moment. "No leads on the person who sent the anonymous email this morning, either," the policeman continued. "We've tried tracing their IP, but we just don't have the technology that we used to, and they know their stuff. We're totally in the dark there."

Right. The anonymous email. Sans would bet his last ketchup bottle that this anonymous email was from the same person that the kiddo had been contacting since before they'd left America, and if that was the case, it was no wonder that these people hadn't been able to find them. Sans and Alphys both had tried their hand at tracking this Anonymous down, once they'd gotten ahold of a computer to do it with, but had had no luck. And considering the hints that Anonymous had dropped that they were less than a stellar example of human morality, and their blatantly honest admission to having hacked into government files months before the monsters resurfaced, it was no wonder that neither monster had been able to track the person down. Two somewhat moral monsters, without the motivation to develop any kind of hacking skills, trying to hunt down a human hacker who probably had a whole toolkit of nasty to use? They were better off beating up their computer. They'd make more progress that way.

Anonymous. That was another thing to think about. Sans slouched further down into his chair with a faint sigh, his eye-sockets closing in thought.

Until recently, Anonymous has been contacting the kid pretty punctually following them entering a new country. According to the kiddo's email account, last message they got from Anonymous was before they boarded their ship here. Usually, Anonymous would have contacted them by now at least once since they came on-shore if only to check in on things that don't make it onto national news. But here? They haven't done that.

Considering how dedicatedly Anonymous had contacted Frisk until then, Sans didn't think it was a matter of the unknown human losing interest. The only other reason he could think of right off the top of his head? Anonymous used the email to keep track of Frisk's doings that they couldn't find out themselves by watching the news – so them not using the email anymore meant that they no longer needed the email to keep track of what the kid was doing.

Not needing the email means that they have some other means of figuring out what's going on out of the public eye, and there're not many options there. Either this person's been hacking into Frisk's computer – and I kinda doubt that – or they've been keeping an eye on the kiddo personally, maybe even flat-out eavesdropping on them.

With a huff, Sans opened his sockets again. He couldn't think of any people who might be watching the kid personally right off the top of his head except for the fairies, and he didn't exactly see them wanting to help the kid with human politics.

Well, that wasn't quite true. He wouldn't be entirely surprised if the UN representative, Artemis Fowl, was keeping an eye on what Frisk was doing, though he doubted that even someone in as important a position as he was would have the resources to be able to eavesdrop on the kid without being noticed –

Everything slid into place like the pieces of Papyrus's favorite jigsaw puzzle.

The Fowls were once a family of suspected criminals, even if their crimes were never proven. Anonymous is a hacker.

The fairy roses on the Fowl manor grounds, that have been there for years before the monsters even surfaced – which means that the magic that discolored them wasn't caused by monsters.

Artemis Fowl reacted to the CHECK, when no human had ever noticed the subtle magic before.

That last piece of information was the really damning one. He'd been puzzling over that for some time now, ever since coming back from Fowl Manor. How come a human, one without magic so far as he could tell, had reacted to his magic when no other human he'd met ever had?

What if it was because he'd dealt with magic before?

I think we'd know if someone in his position were to get heavily involved with the magi-tech experiments going on in the labs to the extent that he'd have been exposed to magic. It'd probably be all over the news. So that leaves out monster magic. And we haven't seen any human wizards here, at least not yet.

So, not monster magic and probably not human magic. The only other magical being that Fowl could have interacted with were the fairies.

Sans didn't have much time to dwell on this concerning train of thought, however, because it was at this point that heavy, fast, and familiar footsteps came racing down the hall adjacent to the room he and Tori were sitting in, and the door slammed open to reveal Undyne, and a couple other harried officers who looked like they'd been bodily dragged in the fish-lady's wake.

"We know where they are!" Undyne blurted out, a huge toothy grin stretching across her face. "That Anonymous punk sent us an address, they got Frisk out and we know where they are!"


Lids fluttered, and then Frisk's eyes opened. For a moment, they simply lay there, staring blankly at the wall in front of them as their mind whirled, trying to place exactly where they were and how they'd gotten there.

Then they registered that they didn't know where they were, and they bolted up from their position on the floor to look wildly around them for possible enemies.

There were none. Frisk was sprawled out on the floor in what seemed to be an empty office building. The large room they were in was completely empty, save for some light fixtures still on or embedded into the ceiling and a few boxes stacked along the walls – obviously, this building hadn't been this empty all that long ago. No sign of any human threats…

… why did that thought feel like there was something missing at the end? Like there should have been more words to think there, after human threats?

Chara?

The ghost responded immediately, almost making Frisk's ears ring with the intensity of their relief.

*Oh thank God, the sedative they used finally wore off! Frisk, how do you feel?

Frisk blinked. How do I feel?

Quickly, they ran down a mental checklist in their head. Head still attached, as well as limbs, and the rest of their body. Physically, they felt a little dizzy and worn down, but that was easily explained by the limited food they'd been given by the guards in captivity. In other words, fine…

… Which Chara probably already knew. After all, they'd been awake during whatever happened while Frisk was sedated. So why were they asking?

Wait. Sedated. They'd been sedated? Who had sedated them?

Chara, what happened while I was –

*Frisk, how do you feel? What do you remember?

Frisk's heart leaped into their throat. What do you remember? Why would Chara ask that? Did they think something had happened to their memories when they'd been knocked out? They didn't know of any kind of sedative that could do that, but maybe -!

They began running through their memories quickly. The first ones they checked were of the Underground and the Resets. There were too many memories of those to check each one individually, but the most important ones were still there, to Frisk's relief – they still remembered the monsters, everything they'd ever learned about them from magic to the Core to how kind they were, and they still remembered that there were Resets, that there were different timelines that they'd lived through, including two that they… really didn't want to think about. The Genocide timelines.

All there, all accounted for. They sagged in relief. Their memories were intact, and they weren't going to go on a Genocidal rampage. The monsters were still safe from them.

*Anything else?

Frisk blinked.

You're not just worried about my memories of the monsters?

*No! Look, what do you remember about the kidnapping? Being "rescued?"

The kidnapping… right. They'd been kidnapped by members of HuRg. Frisk checked those memories as well, with a puzzled frown on their face. They'd been talking to Beckett on their phone, answering his questions about the monsters. A storefront had exploded, and Toriel had used her magic to protect people from the flames. Someone had slapped a cloth probably liberally soaked in some sort of knock-out drug over their face, and they'd blacked out and woken up in a small closet-sized room, where a human had come in and tried to interrogate them before leaving -

Wait a moment. Wait. There was a curling of dread in their gut at the thought of the unnamed man with cold eyes. Dread which didn't quite make sense with what they were remembering of him. What they remembered was him questioning them with increasing cold frustration, before Chara had decided they'd had enough and taken over to headbutt him, and then he'd left the room with a parting threat. As terrifying as his expression had been, that wasn't enough to warrant this kind of foreboding thinking about him.

Which meant there was something missing. Frisk felt panic claw its way up their throat. They were missing memories.

Chara, what happened there?! What am I missing?!

*God damn it… okay, calm down, calm down! Deep breaths.

They sucked in a deep breath, let it out, breathed in, breathed out. They kept doing this until their throat unclogged itself, and the felt like they could actually properly think again.

*Calm now?

Frisk nodded, still breathing carefully.

*Good. Now listen carefully, Frisk. That human had magic –

What?!

*That human had magic, I wasn't done yet! That human had magic – he used his voice to try to hypnotize you into telling you about how you kept avoiding assassination attempts, and you nearly told him about the Resets.

Their heart began to pound faster and faster in their chest. There was no way. Humans didn't have… no, humans could still have magic. Sans had told them so. They just hadn't met a human wizard before. That didn't mean it wasn't possible. And Chara wouldn't lie about this sort of thing.

Frisk definitely wouldn't trust Chara if it came down to figuring out who stole the last chocolate bar in the fridge, but when it came to things like this, things that threatened the monsters? Chara didn't lie.

*That's not all that happened, either. Do you remember all the research you did in the library? The stuff about fairies?

Frisk shook their head. Why would I research fairies? They're not real…

*That's what we thought before Flowey came to find us in Dublin and tell us about meeting people that weren't humans or monsters poking around the Underground.

Frisk shook their head in denial. There's no way… wouldn't we have noticed them by now, if there were really fairies flying around?

*Not if they can turn invisible. Flowey only noticed them because they were vibrating really fast, and he felt them through his roots. And not if they could erase memories. Like they erased yours.

But that's… Frisk's internal voice trailed off into silence. They'd been about to say that's impossible, but…

Flowey wouldn't leave the Underground unless something really big was to happen. Discovering a new magical species would be something really big. Invisibility? Unlikely, but… not impossible. Erasing memories would explain me missing some things that I should know, like the magic.

And above all else, Chara wouldn't lie about this. Not in a billion years.

That certainty, the knowledge that to Chara, a potential threat to the monsters like these fairies would never, ever be treated as a joke, was enough. As if a switch had been flicked in their brain, every memory they were missing came rushing back.

Flowey grinning in his pot about having found something new, going through books upon books in the library with Sans, the newspaper clippings, the fairy roses on the Fowl Estate in a book of fairy sightings, the assassins all claiming to have heard a musical voice whose orders they couldn't have disobeyed, Crane, escaping under a technological invisibility cloak and through a tunnel dug by a dwarf who'd literally eaten his way through the rock, the flight to the moon-base building at Tara, the centaur, the mind wipe – The mind-wipe!

"Oh God," Frisk whimpered, the shock making them speak out loud. "They tried to erase my memories! They almost – they –"

Noises. Voices, calling out from somewhere below them. Frisk's head came up, brain still swamped with new-old memories and barely able to make out the voices and what they were saying, or even recognize them. But Chara could, and did.

*That's Undyne!

Undyne. Frisk didn't need to think about their next move. They opened their mouth and shouted as loud as they could with a voice hoarse from a few days' lack of use.

"Undyne! Undyne, I'm up here! Up here!"

The voices lulled, thundering footsteps came stampeding towards them, and Undyne literally broke down the door to the room with the loudest NGAH Frisk had ever heard from her, sending the wooden object crashing to the ground in so many splinters. When her yellow eye landed on Frisk in the middle of the floor, her mouth split into an enormous toothy grin.

"Frisk!" In two short strides, she was hoisting Frisk up into the air in a powerful bear hug, hardly giving them room to breathe. "What the hell, you've got the crummiest luck in the history of luck! You got shot, you got kidnapped -!"

More voices. Most were still unfamiliar, but one, softer but no less powerful for it, broke through the noise.

"Let me through! Please let me through! Frisk!"

The next thing Frisk knew, they'd swapped monsters, and gone from wiry, scaly arms to warm, furry ones. Toriel's relieved face filled their vision, her eyes scrunched up and teary.

"Oh, my child, I thought – I thought I'd –" She stopped, her breath hitching, her arms shaking, her entire body shaking, and then with a quiet sob, she pulled them close, burying her face in their hair.

Frisk didn't need to be told what the rest of her sentence would have been. They already knew.

I thought I'd lost you.

They forced a weak, guilty smile onto their face, and wrapped their own arms as far around the monster Queen as they could, resting their head on her trembling shoulder.

"You didn't lose me, Mom," they whispered. "You didn't lose me. I'm sorry…"

…I won't let this happen again.


As daniel put it after reading this chapter, "aaaaaaaaand the fairies are positively screwed."

Yes. Yes they are. Poor fairies aren't going to know what hit them. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

No asterisks in this chapter, but I'm going to drop some AF canon info anyway: the fairies have two kinds of mind-wipes. The first kind is a blanket mind-wipe, where the fairies just wipe ALL the memories a human has of a specific period of time – if they'd done this to Frisk, that would've meant wiping every memory from Flowey arriving in Ireland to the present, including all their ambassador work. Obviously, they did not do that. The other kind of mind-wipe is a more fine-tuned one – instead of erasing all memories from a period, they go through the memories from the allotted period of time and only remove fairy-related memories. This is what they did to Frisk. With both mind-wipe types, the human brain will automatically fill in the memory gaps with new memories, and then refuses to let go of those false memories unless a source of info that the mind-wipe victim trusts implicitly (this can be a person, a classified database, etc) tells them what they're not remembering. With Artemis, that source of information was him recording all his fairy info himself for his post-wipe self to watch and listen to, as his pre-fairy self trusted no-one but himself. With Frisk, that source is Chara, who never, ever lies when it comes to possible threats to the monsters' safety, or when it comes to memory loss.

And now, worldbuilding: Jack54311 asked: "How exactly do SAVE points occur? In the game they occurred in places where you felt a strong sense of Determination. I'm assuming that is not the case here. Do they occur in places that had a high concentration of magic? Also, do they still heal Frisk?"

Yeah, SAVE points are heavily influenced by how much magic there is in an area. The more magic there is in an area, the more likely it is for there to be a SAVE point there. However, that's not the only factor - the whole game mechanic of the SAVE points appearing in places you feel a lot of Determination also contributes, albeit not exactly as it does in-game. SAVE points aren't influenced by current emotional states, but rather by the combined feelings of Determination that Frisk/Chara have felt in previous timelines. Which means that the SAVE points, though their functionality is more or less the same, have changed locations a number of times throughout the different timelines that the kiddos have gone through at this point. (And yes, the SAVE points still heal Frisk when they're used.) The amount of magic and DT from previous timelines in a location also affects how many SAVEs Frisk can LOAD at a specific SAVE point. The more magic or more DT there is influencing a particular SAVE point, the more times Frisk/Chara can LOAD using that particular SAVE star.

Jack also pointed out that, as SAVE points act as an anchor of sorts for a LOAD, and that SAVE points are essentially nothing more than a cluster of extremely high concentration of magic, it would make sense for something even more powerful to serve as an anchor for a Reset. They then asked me if this point is when Frisk and Chara's SOULS became linked to one another. And that is definitely the case! Good job on Jack for figuring that out!