CHAPTER TWO
Timelines tangled.
And he wasn't the only one.
The script had changed.
As I said, ripped and rewritten on remains.
A certain…human, had gotten curious.
A human from a very, very long time ahead of him.
After all, what happens if you load a save file that isn't yours?
What happens if you load a save file made by a dead person?
The human frisk, standing in the future, was trying to travel to the past from before they even existed.
a risky, risky business.
…hey now, don't give me that look, beloved, I never said frisk or chara would not be a part of this tale. I just said it wouldn't be where we began.
Anyway, what frisk discovered was that you end up in a lot of trouble. The save immediately corrupted itself, the rules scrambled and torn and broken.
It's a bad idea to mess with the script.
Not even I know how frisk managed to become curious- they were never meant to.
Something interfered…something beyond the script.
Something that laughs in darkness.
But I think everyone can agree-
determination is trouble.
Anyway, A paradox sprung into being out of their misguided curiosity. If a person dies but cannot RELOAD, what happens to their SAVE? And what happens if that same person returns, soulless, hitched to someone else with a powerful soul, that then tries to SAVE over the soulless ones SAVE? But the soulless one is also bypassing the same SAVE to SAVE for themselves, too?
And what happens to the one with a powerful soul, whose last SAVE was in the future?
…makes your head hurt, doesn't it?
Mine too.
Time is weird and dangerous, always has been.
Irregularities upon irregularities, this human had broken time herself, the well oiled clock of reality suddenly had a wrench in its gears.
And that, Is trouble.
Reset is a part of the script, a natural power, used in frivolous ways. But these sorts of loopholes… they make the universe break in real ways.
Ways with consequences.
Well, what happened was frisk and chara being booted back to their last stable save.
Which was, actually,
Nowhere.
And so everything they'd done was erased.
Do not look at me that way! I am very serious. Everything, beloved, was erased. Now stop interrupting.
all their memories too, all gone.
flowey, toriel, asgore, papyrus…
Chara and Frisk, technically, with their monumental mistake, had created an entire other timeline.
while their old one crumbled to dust.
well, not dust. It wasn't gone entirely.
There are always…echoes.
warped echoes.
Memories buried in the most persistent…
Maybe one, maybe one could remember.
Maybe the ones outside of time, outside of the rules…
But perhaps not.
After all, a footprint does not always look like a boot.
Regardless, the timeline that burst from their mistake was…
Unstable. Fractured.
…missing…certain parts.
essential parts.
times, places, dates…all just slightly scrambled.
But slight changes make big differences.
everything just slightly mixed, but still strangely the same.
Like a play with new characters thrown in, like a story with two plots, but still with the play missing props and the story missing words.
Strange, I know.
The child…the child was sent all the way back to the very beginning, before anyone had known, sans, flowey, chara even…
Back before every reset, back to the very first moment Flowey found himself powerless.
Back to when they first tried to climb the mountain.
So, no harm done, right?
It would just happen all over again, right?
Wrong.
The child that was sent to 20XX, wasn't frisk.
The child that chara now hitched to when they fell, didn't have a red soul.
She had a green one.
You see, Frisk was now in the past, far in the past, ending up the one climbing the mountain all those years ago to become the sixth soul. Their memories were intact, but that did not help them, however determined they were, because when they tried to save…
*You reach out to a mysterious power… but it rejects you.
They were harvested by the first snowdrake.
Becoming the sixth soul, floating in the hall.
Fates, swapped.
Script, torn.
As I said, everything was scrambled. Now, rewritten by the desperate makings of time, the script said the soul of Kindness climbed the mountain that fateful day.
And, instead of frisk…
a young human named Misericordia from a harbour town, driven out with fork and fire, gained the power of SAVE and RESET when she fell to the bed of golden flowers.
You see, you don't need DETERMINATION itself to save and reset.
You just have to fit the script.
And, as per the script, she woke chara.
Chara…didn't like her very much, but still.
Even in the depths of the void, floating in nothingness, the presence of her soul so strange and out of place, awoke even gaster, his own glitching soul pulsing in his chest as his eyes slowly came open.
He'd slept for so long…
How long?
But now, he was awake.
Mostly due to brilliant light erupting from the gaping crack in the void.
Well, what do you think happens when the universe turns itself inside out? A disco?