There's nothing quite so relaxing as waking up in a warm bed, snug and together between the blankets with just the faintest hint of a winter's chill to encourage you to stay right where you are, whiling away the morning. It was peaceful, serene. I didn't bother opening my eyes, taking a deep breath; the intertwining scents of butterscotch and cinnamon made me smile. It could have been Christmas morning, with presents and hot coco ready for me downstairs, and I didn't even live on a second floor. I felt good. Which was funny, because I got the feeling I should have felt like I'd been hit by several trucks.

Ba-beep. Ba-beep. Ba-beep.

Even in a daze, I could still recognize the sound of a heart monitor. It sort of put a damper on the idea of relaxing in bed. Where was I this time?

Ba-beep-ba-beep-ba-beep.

I was near medical equipment. If it failed, somebody was going to die and it would be all my fault.

I tried sitting up as the heart monitor beeped faster, and I fought with the warm covers to get away until a dog licked my face and barked. A pair of heavy paws pushed me back down, preventing me from moving around.

I blinked. "Mouse?" I asked, trying to get my bearings. "What's going on?"

The haze around my mind faded and the images I'd been looking at without seeing started to make sense.

Sort of.

There was a large, fluffy white dog wearing a grey suit of half plate armor standing by the bed I was laying in, panting and smiling a doggy smile; it was standing tall, like a human, and a once-over showed that its tail was outside the armor and wagging furiously. Some kind of IV was taped to my left forearm, and my right arm was sealed in a heavy cast. A quick look to where it and a few other cords were going, and I saw them threaded down into a strange oaken chest. Just past that was a circle, and just past that was… another oaken chest. This time, wires were coming out of the chest, and they were connected to the heart monitor and some other equipment I couldn't recognize.

All the equipment, and the many wires that were connected to it, were covered in little glowing symbols.

It took me another moment to realize that I had little rectangular tags up and down my body, where I was only wearing a pair of long pant-scrubs, and little clips were wired from them and also leading into the first box.

I was in a hospital room, or something made to look like one. The distinct lack of a sterile chemical smell and the carpeted floor both made the former option less likely. My orderly was also apparently some kind of medieval knight Pomeranian, so there was that, too.

"I'm coming!" A voice called out, and the door burst open a moment later. "The echocardiogram stopped transmitting and the heart monitor is freaking out, is he awake?" Alphys carefully walked around the outside of the circle I was in, holding a clipboard and checking the various monitoring equipment I must have somehow been hooked up to. "You're awake!" she cheered, making the strange dog-man bark and prance on the spot like dogs do when they're excited. Alphys turned to him from her side of the circle and started writing notes as he barked. "CHECK again, I want to be sure everything else is back up to pre-dissolved levels."

I put my hands up as best I could from the mess of covers and said, "Alright, hold the phone, stop, no." I did my best to look past the messed-up covers to see Alphys stopped in place, like a deer in headlights. I idly noted that one of the rectangular tags stuck up and down my chest had fallen off. "Can you catch me up on what's going on?" I tried asking. "Please? Because this isn't the first time I've woken up in a strange place in the past few days, and I want to know what I'm missing this time before something explodes."

"R-right," she stuttered, nodding quickly. "Right, um, let me think for a second."

She looked over the equipment again, then shook her head and turned back to me.

"What were you asking again?"

The dog-orderly barked, wagging its tail harder, and did more of that weird stutter step that dogs do when they're too excited to sit still. I used my cast-covered arm to poke at its arms, now painfully shoving me into the bed. "Please move."

The dog did so with a yip, stepping back, but not over the circle.

"Alright, first things first, how come the medical equipment hasn't exploded yet?" I pointed to it, where it stubbornly kept ba-beeping away. "I get that it has something to do with the circles and boxes, but any live movements or flows through the circle should be enough to disrupt it."

"O-oh," Alphys looked down at the circle, then gave me as best a smile as she could muster; it wasn't much, and faded just as quickly. "I-I came up with it. Dimensional boxes work like a little pocket in the, uh, the Nevernever, a-and all of them connect to one another. It's not actually the Nevernever, because a circle would prevent anything from coming in or going out through any magical means but a dimensional fold gets away with it because it's kind of like oxygen and other smaller particles that can pass through circles without having any-"

"Woah, woah, slow down there," I reached up to rub my head and clocked myself when my new cast caught me in the eyebrow. I shook it off, then paused. I touched the spots around and above my eye, and miracle of miracles, it neither hurt nor was even bandaged anymore. The cut was gone.

"Fine," I agreed with whatever Alphys was saying, "the boxes aren't magical except they probably are somehow, and you've managed to bypass a circle using a sympathetic link between something inside and something outside." I looked down at the IV in my left arm. "Speaking of sympathetic links, please tell me you haven't taken any blood samples?"

She winced. "We, uh, we had to," she admitted. "W-without it, w-we couldn't get a baseline on your magic. If it helps, w-we'll destroy any samples we have left."

Mindful of the IV, I did my best to bury my face into my weak, uncovered left hand. Despite their best efforts, my hand's melted, waxy flesh still didn't feel like skin. The good feelings I'd been having went the way of the Dodo while I focused on the vague, almost dead nerves in my left hand.

Damn if I didn't feel like an invalid right then.

"Knowing my luck, the Necromancers have a sample of it by now. I've certainly left enough of it around at this point," I huffed.

The Pomeranian dog-knight whined and leaned down to lick my face again. I was shocked enough to nearly fall off the bed, and nearly hit it with my cast moving back. It still licked me on the face despite my struggling, which sort of weirded me out, considering everything else going on.

"Next important question," I started, pushing the panting dog back a bit, then paused. "Actually, no, first, how long until I can take all this stuff off? It's cool and all that you've managed to work around my tech-bane, but if I've been out for long at all, then there's not much time left until Halloween Night. Which was the question I was about to ask anyway, what time is it?"

Alphys gave me a sickly grin and chuckled weakly. "Uh, about that…"

I sat myself up in the bed, and the armored dog helped fluff my pillow. I blinked when I saw a sword and shield laying against the nearby wall, the shield inscribed with the delta rune the Monsters seemed to use as their call sign. I turned my attention back to Alphys, and the little yellow lizard girl seemed to wilt under my gaze.

Finally, she dropped her head and continued more slowly.

"I'm, uh, sorry. We put you back together using a combination of Monster magic, human magic, medicine, a few bits of Monster remains that some families volunteered to fill in some of the missing structure of your SOUL"—my heart caught for a brief moment, but Alphys didn't notice—"and a nasty compound we call Determination. Not a lot of it, but enough to hold everything else together. We… we don't know the exact effects it'll have on you, as a Wizard, and it shouldn't have any long term effects, because you're a human, but… we don't know. It's-" she seems to sink in on herself a bit more. "It's not something we… something I have used with much success in the past."

"Well that's… ominous," I said slowly, trying not to think too hard about the implications of everything she'd said regarding my soul. "Am I- ...how experimental was all of this?"

She shook her head, still staring at the floor.

Ba-beep. Ba-beep. Ba-beep.

"Great, good to know," I soldiered on, biting back the desire to scream about how there were multiple people's souls grafted to my own, "but can I take all this stuff off or not? If I'm caught in bed and everybody dies while I'm laid up, then everything you've done probably isn't going to matter at all. That, or I'll find out the hard way if you've put things back together wrong."

She looked up, startled, then shrugged. "I-I mean, from everything we could CHECK, you're in good health. S-sure, you could take it all off. Here, let me-"

She started turning the machines off while I peeled off the little sticky rectangles, noting that there were tiny wires leading to my arms, the ends of my legs, and several on my chest. After the last machine was turned off, Alphys confidently crossed the circle and helped me take the IV out of my arm. She held a little cotton swab against it for me.

"And my arm?" I waved my cast wildly at her. "I may be asking a lot here, but I'm not left handed. I can slow down and focus long enough to cast through the pain, unless doing so would rip open whatever magical stitches you've left in me. Can-"

An ice cold, terrifying thought wormed its way into my mind.

"I can still use magic… can't I?"

"Of course you can use magic!" Alphys was too surprised at my question to stutter. "With all the extra bits you might even be able to cast it better! Toriel and I worked touch and go with you at first, but like-" She blinked a few times, visibly changing gears. "Like I said, every CHECK tells us you're fine. Healthy, even. We can remove the cast now, just be careful not to get hurt again."

I suspected she was going to say something else for a moment there, possibly relating to those side effects she was talking about, but I was more relieved at the one thing that wasn't going wrong than anything else.

"Good," I told her. I held up my arm. "Then let's get it off, and get me back into my clothes. I've got work to do."

"Um…" she hesitated. "About that other question you wanted to ask?"

"Yeah?" I asked, watching her throw the cotton swab into a tiny trash can. "Which one?"

"H-happy Halloween?"

It was five o'clock. In the evening. On the night the Necromancers were going to try their big ritual. I'd lost more than 24 hours laying around in bed while things fell apart for everybody else.

Toriel was in a coma. Apparently ripping a hole in the Earth large enough to park an 18 wheeler in while suffering from "literally losing your soul" wasn't a good idea, and the surgery that had put me back together had taken over twelve hours and, as Alphys had said, some kind of pseudo-necromancy using the remains of several of the piles of dust that had been recovered from Bock's Bookstore (and didn't that thought make my skin crawl). While the Monsters' families had all agreed to give basically anything to the war effort, it still felt like I'd been a part of something I really shouldn't have been.

While the room I'd been sleeping it off in was designed to heal the body, mind and soul, it didn't change that Toriel had run herself ragged contributing most of the raw magic required to fix me. After everything else had been taken care of, she'd passed out while trying to heal my crippled left hand. It apparently hadn't occurred to her to stop after they'd made sure I wasn't dying anymore. She was expected to make a swift recovery, but several kinds of exhaustion meant it would be a coin flip whether she'd be on her feet and ready for battle before November first rolled around.

While the Monsters had played Frankenstein with my mangled soul, everything else had gone to hell.

That metal ritual ring Liverspots had used to turn himself into a what-the-fuck-is-that, the one that left images of Monsters dying in agony burned into my skull, had apparently been stolen from a military convoy that was trying to take it out of the state to be dropped into whatever equivalent to Mt. Doom the US military had available. Bock's Bookstore had been burned down the rest of the way, for reasons the Monsters weren't sure of. The power was completely out across most of Chicago and the surrounding area, and even the hospitals were dealing with sabotage against their back-ups. A full evacuation of all civilians from the city had been going on in earnest since this morning, made more difficult by several key roads being covered in zombies. The Wardens I'd called in as backup had arrived, seen me dead to the world, and had tried to pick up my investigation without much success. Some of the Wardens were injured, so either they'd already butted heads with the Necromancers, or Ebenezer had sent me walking wounded as my backup. I'm not sure which possibility was worse.

It was also October 31st. Halloween. Possibly the start of yet another apocalypse.

Happy birthday to me.

Alphys had given me the highlights while cutting off my cast, and ended up asking a bunch of strange questions about how I'd managed to split open the graveyard like when Hawk-Eyes Mihawk cut a galleon in half with one swing (her words, not mine). When she was done we went through a few tests to verify that yes, I did still have a working right hand. She was a warning not to mess around with it, which Lasciel quietly informed me was crap.

Whatever the Monsters had rebuilt me with was enough to fill in the gaps, and unless I damaged my soul again, I'd be capable of using my magic. What the long-term consequences might be, existential and otherwise, we still didn't know.

The yellow lizard had left around then to tend to Toriel, and I'd caught up with Sans in the room we'd had breakfast in, from my perspective, only a few hours ago. He and I had taken over the glass table again, so I could catch up on current events while he drank something akin to a mana potion; the short skeleton was busy giving me the highlights of his spying on the Necromancers, having taken the day to run surveillance while he recovered from the fight in his own way. I'd eaten a couple plates of food myself, and left my dishes in the nearby bar's sink while I listened to the skeleton talk.

The only reason I hadn't run off screaming to try to fix everything was because the Wardens had apparently been told that I'd woken up, and they wanted to talk to me before anything else exploded. So I waited, and the skeleton brought me further up to speed.

I rubbed my head, then did a double take and asked Sans to repeat what he'd just said.

"i said i saw one of them, probably a macbeth fan, carrying some kinda magic human skull-thing, covered in runes," Sans stated tiredly, and I chuckled a little desperately while he sipped on a 'spiritually empowered' hot chocolate. He raised one bony eyebrow. "not sure how relevant that is, but i guess it means something to you."

Oh, and the Necromancers had Bob's skull, too. Part of me already knew that, but it was nice to have it confirmed.

"Is that all?" I asked him quietly, hunched over in my chair, elbows on the table. "You didn't happen to catch four horsemen sniffing around, getting ready to unleash Hell, did you?"

"we're stable on that front," He shrugged, swirled his drink once, then drank the rest in one long pull. He got up to get himself another cup while I glanced at the should-have-been-empty third chair at the table. I say should have been, because Lasciel had set down her phantom copy of the Word of Kemmler on the table next to the Song of the Erlking (also not real), and was looking back and forth between them. The way she'd set them down, it was obvious she was trying to goad me into reading from either one upside down.

She had joined me just after I'd stepped out of my makeshift hospital room, and hadn't disappeared from the corner of my view since. Our little deal, just as small as her reminding me to use the resources I had at hand (literally), and me saying "thank you" in turn, was apparently enough for her to get a foot in the door in my mind.

Part of me wanted to demand that the devil get thee behind me. Another part that belonged in a cave wasn't willing to insult the pretty lady who had saved my life, even if it was for her own gain. And the rest of me was doing its damnedest not to read from either of the books she had left sitting there on the table, lest she start asking for more in turn.

They call her the Deceiver for a reason.

She smirked, then slid the Word over to my side of the table, right where I'd be able to read it while still focusing on Sans once he sat back down.

I saw that it was a primer on the wonders of raising the dead before I pointedly looked at the ceiling.

"so who's the phantom in your head, dresden?" Sans asked, setting his hot chocolate down right through the middle of the pages I was ignoring.

And just like that, he once again had my full attention.

I looked around the room, confirming that we were alone, then met his eyes with a frown. He gave me an ear-to-ear shit-eating grin like only somebody without lips could pull off, then picked his cup back up to take a long gulp.

"come on, you can trust me. no one ever thinks the skeleton is hiding something 'cus you can see right through them. i don't mind being the only no-body you hang out with."

I didn't answer him. For all he screwed around, he'd made it pretty clear he was the Monsters' equivalent of a spymaster, and he'd Soul Gazed me to boot.

But even a non-answer was enough that he caught on to what I wasn't saying.

"i'll keep it to myself, ol' buddy, ol' pal," he reassured me with a wink. "so long as you keep fighting to keep whoever or whatever it is under wraps, you don't have to worry about it. after all, out of sight, out of mind, right?"

"Exactly," I quickly agreed. "Speaking of being out of your mind, tell me something," I changed the subject. "Do you have any idea what Liver spots said while he was bleeding out? I felt his Death Curse. If you heard it, I'd like to know what I need to be ready for."

Sans shrugged. "he mumbled it, but it was something like 'die in agony.' not nice, but probably not as bad as 'lose your magic' or 'get super cancer' or whatever. it hit tori and me, too, so it got split three ways. with how much magic he was playing with, it might not matter."

"Die in agony?" I tasted the words as I said them, compared them to my memory of the cadence and flow of Snakeboys' last moments. It definitely sounded like something the ex-denerian would wish on his enemies. "Hey, do you think that means that if we think we're dying, but it doesn't hurt, we'd actually be assured we were going to live?"

Sans sipped his coco and looked a little off in the distance, considering it. "if that's true, then if we couldn't feel pain anymore, would that make us immortal?"

It was my turn to shrug, and I scratched at the phantom memory of the pain in my eye. Or maybe it was just eye crust, it could have gone either way. "No matter what happens, at least we can take comfort in knowing our jokes will never get old."

He smiled again.

"why don't you ask if your imaginary friend knows anything?"

I clenched my left hand into a fist. According to my usual attending physician, Butters, exercises like imagining you're squeezing somebody's head to mush helped speed up the recovery process.

"I'd rather we dropped the subject," I finally told him, my eyes darting to Lashiel despite my best efforts when she hummed at a passage she was reading in the Erlking book. I was still more-or-less avoiding even looking at Kemmler's book, but again, she'd put it right where looking at Sans was practically reading the book, and she'd somehow sized up the fonts just in case I was having trouble seeing everything. "I'm handling, the… uninvited passenger in my own way."

Sans suddenly turned to look at something behind me, and I glanced back. Then I glanced down.

Frisk had somehow snuck up on our conversation.

"I had the same problem with Chara," Frisk admitted, looking past us at the empty third chair. The kid walked steadily around the table, pulled out the fallen-angel-occupied seat, and the illusion of her stood out of the way as Frisk took her seat; she picked up the Song of the Erlking and stepped away, apparently to keep reading it.

I, meanwhile, went from trying to explain things carefully to the kid straight into, "Who was Chara?"

Which apparently I'd said out loud.

Frisk's narrowed eyes flashed, and Sans grimaced.

"don't cut in while the adults are talking, kid," Sans muttered. "we may not be on the bleeding edge here, but you should know better than to eavesdrop anyway."

"That wasn't funny the last dozen times you said it, either," Frisk huffed at the skeleton, then turned back to me. "Go on, ask him," the kid urged me. "Ask why we're mean to each other."

I crossed my arms, but kept my eyes on the child. Something was wrong, and it wasn't just the phantom sensation I'd been feeling since I'd learned that part of my healing process had involved grade-A dead people. Little tickling spiders of cold were telling me that Frisk's tone was wrong, and more than that.

It felt like I was being watched from behind, and taking an obvious look to ensure it was just the three of us didn't make the feeling go away.

"Fine, I'll bite," I finally said. "Why are you two fighting?"

Frisk's eyes opened wide, and they flickered like the blazing embers of a dying fire as the kid stared into my soul.

The Soul Gaze started almost instantly.

I was standing above some kind of massive elongated tunnel, nothing like the one found in Sans' soul. I looked down on it, and saw the entire Underground, grass blade by grass blade, tree leaf by tree leaf, from the hole several stories up at one end to the blinding-white barrier at the other. I was wrong, I realized, because Sans' own golden hallway was near to the far side, and I could see it with a startling clarity, given how far away from it all I was, like the details had all been painstakingly burned into Frisk's soul along the way.

I was standing above the strange curving path, beyond where any person could have actually stood, and two sets of words hovered in front of me:

Continue _ Do Not

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