I FINALLY finished another chapter. Sorry it took me so long, guys! I should, theoretically, be able to go back to a more regular updating schedule in another week or so, but I don't know for sure.
The police were understandably concerned when a cart full of nervous monsters, their Ambassador, and their cart driver pulled up in front of the station. They graduated from concerned to downright alarmed when Frisk and Flowey repeated their claims of having seen people with guns near the hotel, and within a few minutes, the group had been ushered inside and was sitting huddled in a group in the waiting room. It was at this point, when they were finally out of immediate danger and one of the policemen was barking orders to people through a walkie-talkie, that Frisk wondered if they'd made the right choice.
Maybe I should have dealt with them myself, they fretted silently, watching as one of the station's carts was trotted away towards the city, full of a small squad of officers. If the gunmen aren't there, then that means they got away, and they're still at large. If they are there, then… people could get hurt.
*Come on, Frisk, it was this or risk the monsters' safety again. Stop fretting already, it's getting on my nerves.
They frowned uncertainly. But Chara –
*Look, I get it. You're worried about the officers. You're worried about the people on the street. Worrying about them won't do any good now.
The impatience in Chara's voice was nearly palpable, and so was the anxiety underneath it. Despite their words, the ghost was just as worried as Frisk was – likely not for the officers, since despite Frisk's best efforts Chara's hatred of humanity had only been diminished to a simmering dislike - but for any monster bystanders near the hotel. They almost called the ghost out on it, but after a moment, decided not to. In all likelihood, they'd only make Chara's mood worse, and it wouldn't do them any favors.
After that, it was a waiting game. A couple of minutes passed. Then five. Then ten.
The rest of the group had calmed down somewhat, even the trembling cart driver, but Frisk still remained nervous, watching through the station's glass front doors for any sign of the squadron of officers returning and fidgeting anxiously. So focused on the doors were they, that they nearly didn't notice a furry arm loop around them in a one-armed hug, a gesture clearly meant to comfort. When they glanced up at Toriel, she gave them a shaken smile, but didn't ask them if they were okay. In all likelihood, she already knew that they weren't.
Fifteen minutes. Twenty. Twenty-five.
Someone appeared from the depths of the building with several steaming mugs. Toriel accepted the one offered to her with a soft thank you, and Frisk reluctantly tore their attention away from the doors to do the same. It was hot chocolate – they could smell it before they even looked into the mug to be sure. They took a couple of sips, only able to take the smallest amount of comfort from the sweet taste before their eyes were drawn back to the doors.
Thirty minutes. Forty.
At forty-three minutes, the walkie-talkie on a nearby officer's belt screamed to life as an all too familiar voice made itself known over the airwaves, only slightly muffled by the speakers.
"NGAAAAA, WHY THE HELL DIDN'T ANYBODY TELL ME ABOUT THE GUNMEN NEAR FRISK'S HOTEL?! MY BESTIE BETTER BE ALRIGHT, YOU HEAR ME?!"
Undyne. Frisk cracked a weak grin as the officer whose walkie-talkie had screamed winced, and then pulled the device off his belt and lifted it up next to his ear with a look of trepidation on his face.
"The Ambassador is fine, Officer Undyne," he managed. "They're here at the station, along with several other monsters, including the Queen." He began to walk away, wincing as Undyne kept yelling through the speakers (no doubt permanently damaging his poor, poor eardrums), until he was not quite out of earshot, stopping just inside the doorway that opened to the rest of the station.
"Well, at least Undyne is perfectly fine," Toriel said, sounding slightly strained. "I'll admit I was a little worried, but it seems my worry was unwarranted."
Then the still-audible, if not understandable, voice was cut off by another over the radio, one considerably softer and unfamiliar. The officer's eyes widened, then narrowed, his lips pursing. After several long moments, he replied tersely, and then lowered the walkie-talkie from his mouth and turned back to their little group.
"You are an incredibly lucky kid, you know that?" He asked Frisk, raising an eyebrow. "You nearly rolled right into a death trap. If you hadn't spotted that gunman..."
They caught the assassins? "There really were gunmen there? At the hotel?"
He nodded in confirmation. "The squad managed to arrest two of them, and there were at least two others that got away, possibly more. They're bringing the perps to the station now." He grimaced. "One of the two they caught was… in your hotel room."
A startled squeak escaped from them before they could stop it. In our -?
"WHAT?!" Flowey, finally piping up for the first time in a little over half an hour. He sounded more angry than shocked, and hearing that, Frisk quickly pulled themselves back together. The more shaken they looked, the more likely it was for Flowey to stay angry, and an angry Flowey tended to do things that could cause some serious problems later on. The last thing they needed was him attacking one of the officers or something, and getting arrested for assault.
"How did they get in?" They asked softly. "Is anybody… hurt?"
The man shook his head. "A couple of casualties, but no fatalities. The ones that got away held civilians at gunpoint until they could make a break for it. Couple people got shot, but not anywhere vital – at most, they'll need some surgery and maybe some monster food, and they'll be golden. As for how the perp got in..." At this point, he grimaced again. "We think he stole one of the hotel keys from the front desk, while the receptionist was distracted by the commotion outside, but we're not one hundred percent sure."
Frisk sighed with relief. So nobody's dead. Thank goodness.
"It'd probably be a good idea to change hotels, then." Sans pointed out from his seat. He was still faux-relaxed, with his hands in his pockets, when they glanced over at him, but his grin looked a little more strained than usual. "All of us. Me 'n Pap are only a few doors down from Tori and the kiddo."
"That would probably be for the best, yes," the officer admitted, then winced as Undyne's voice roared over the speakers once more – she was demanding to be involved with interrogating the suspects. "Excuse me, can we discuss this later? I'd like to be able to save the squadron's ears."
When he got confirmation, he walked off at a brisk pace, disappearing into the depths of the station as he reached for his walkie-talkie once more.
Almost thirty minutes later, Undyne almost kicked down the front door with a yell of "ALRIGHT, WHERE ARE THE ASSHOLES THAT TRIED TO HURT MY BESTIE?!"
"OH, HELLO UNDYNE!" Papyrus waved cheerfully at her. "WOWIE, THAT UNIFORM MAKES YOU LOOK ALMOST AS COOL AS ME!"
The monster paused, visibly torn between preening at the compliment – she did look pretty cool in that uniform – and mild terror, because she'd noticed that Toriel was in the same room as her, and was giving her the Toriel-patented disapproving stare. "Er..."
Frisk quickly waved to catch the monster's attention. "You're alright, right Undyne? I know you weren't involved with what was going on at the hotel, but if the ones that got away are still at large..."
Undyne bared her teeth in a sharkish grin. "Ha! As if those punks could hurt me." She strode over and bent down to give them an affectionate noogie. "If they tried anything, they'd get a face full of spears!"
A voice crackled over her radio, and she quickly snatched it off her belt with a roll of her visible eye. "Talk to you later, punk, I gotta go pester someone about the interrogation. No way I'm missing out on getting those jerks to shi – to poop in their pants out of fear!"
She stomped off, her footsteps seeming to echo off the walls even after she was no longer in sight.
After a moment, the cart driver, who'd been sitting a couple chairs away from the monsters the entire time they'd been waiting, asked meekly, "Is she… always like that?"
"OF COURSE!" Papyrus practically beamed at the man. "SHE WOULDN'T BE UNDYNE WITHOUT WELL-INTENTIONED VIOLENCE!"
"O-oh..."
A couple of minutes later, the cart that had left a little over an hour previously rolled past the door, chock full of serious-faced officers and two slightly dazed men in handcuffs, and Frisk finally, finally let themselves relax.
Frisk must have fallen asleep sometime after the cart had arrived because they were jolted out of a mercifully dreamless sleep by a door slamming open. Groggily, they opened their eyes to see Undyne stride across the room towards them and practically hurl herself into a chair next to them with a ngah of intense frustration.
Blinking, they checked the clock on the wall (it looked like another hour or so had passed since the last time they'd checked), and then turned to the fish monster, reaching up to rub the sleep out of their eyes.
"Is the interrogation over?" they managed, struggling to stifle a yawn. "What'd you find out?"
"Pretty much nothing!" Undyne growled. She leveled a death glare at the door she'd just come stomped through. "What's with criminals and the whole amnesia shtick all of a sudden?!" She pitched her voice higher, presumably mockingly. "'Oh no officer, I can't remember a damn thing about who gave me my orders! All I can remember is that they had a voice like a choir of angels and church bells ringing, I can't even tell you what gender they were!' Bullshit."
Sleepiness gone, Frisk stared at Undyne for a moment, unsure if they'd heard the monster correctly.
Chara?
*I heard her, too. "Voice like a choir of angels"… What the hell.
They swallowed, fully agreeing with Chara's sentiment. A musical voice, and lack of memory…
Was there a fairy involved with this?
Fowl Manor had become blissfully calm as soon as the Ambassador and their escort of monsters had left, and the fairies still present were taking full advantage of this. Most of them had been up in the air for the entire duration of the afternoon, too paranoid to risk even so much as a single toe touching the ground, and although their suits and wingsets had been built with such things in mind, there was only so much hovering a fairy could handle before they needed to land, dump the excess gear, and stretch their limbs on solid ground.
Of course, the tranquility of the grounds was only temporary, and nobody knew that better than Holly, but she was doing to take full advantage of the peace and quiet before it was ruined for her by some unforeseen complication in the near future, and so had settled herself down in one of the Fowl gardens far away from the rest of the squadron. She had no patience for the rest of her team right now.
Unfortunately, time had this awful tendency to speed past when she wasn't involved in a high-stakes situation, and so it seemed like only a few minutes before a certain centaur's voice in her ear ended her well-earned break.
"Er, Holly? Something's just come up."
The elf groaned loudly. "If it's not the end of the world as we know it, I don't want to hear it. I've already had enough troll dung to wade through today, thanks."
"Sorry, no new apocalypse starting anytime soon, but I think this is something you really have to see. I'm sending a link to a video to your helmet feed."
Tiredly, Holly reached up to lower the visor of her helmet over her eyes once more, and, when the link to the video appeared in the display, she blinked at it to select it. The image that expanded to fill her view appeared to be something off of a human news station, two humans behind a desk in front of screens of images, with titles rolling past on the bottom of the screen.
"Foaly, what am I su -" She didn't need to finish her question, because that was when she spotted what had likely caught the centaur's attention – the words scrolling across the bottom of the screen currently read Assassination Attempt of the Monster Ambassador Fails – Two Shooters Apprehended, Others Still at Large.
"Thanks to Ambassador Frisk's keen sense of observation, the police were made aware of the threat quickly, and moved in to apprehend the suspects," one news anchor was saying. "The Ambassador was returning to their hotel with a small company of monsters, and barely a block away from the building, claimed to have spotted one of the suspects with gun in hand –"
Holly blinked, then gritted her teeth. "Foaly, important as this is –"
"Holly, they didn't see any gunmen. A couple of officers had been tailing them since the Manor, and they did a brief scan of their surroundings only a few moments before Frisk claimed to have seen one, and there were no guns visible! If fairy cameras couldn't pick them up, what makes you think human eyes could?" The centaur sucked in an aggravated breath. "Remember the report from earlier? The one about what happened at the roses?"
Holly hadn't been the fairy patrolling near the fairy roses when Frisk had had another odd series of symptoms similar to what had occurred at the gala, but as the team leader, she'd received the report afterward. One of the sprites watching over them had spotted the ambassador approaching the center of the spiral, reach out to what seemed to be thin air – and then suddenly double over as if in pain. The sprite hadn't been able to get much closer to eavesdrop – one of the monsters, the short skeleton monster, had accompanied the child, and it hadn't been worth the risk. However, the fairy had used the zoom function of their visor's cameras to see the Ambassador's face in clearer detail, and read their lips.
"'Assassins at the hotel,'" Holly muttered. "'We can't go back, they're waiting for us.'" Her eyes widened. "Wait – they knew the assassins were there? How?! Was it another anonymous call, like with the first assassin?"
"Actually," Artemis's voice sounded over the communicator before Foaly could reply, "it appears that there was no anonymous call then, either."
"What?"
The clacking of a keyboard followed Holly's exclamation, and then Artemis continued, sounding slightly distracted, "Perhaps a week ago I managed to obtain a copy of their calls from the days shortly before and after the gala – the only calls made that corresponded to the assassination attempt was one made by Frisk themselves, addressed to the police, only two days before the attempt."
"D'Arvit." The elf raised her visor once more so she could massage her forehead in an attempt to take care of the rising headache. "Are you sure the call wasn't from earlier, maybe a few weeks back?"
"If they had known for that period of time, then Frisk would have contacted the police much sooner, and sounded far less panicked whilst doing so," the human pointed out dryly. "They are a prodigy such as myself – I have no doubt they understand the merit of a few weeks of planning." More keyboard sounds. "This combined with the information I learned today has some… interesting implications."
Holly's subconscious immediately threw up several warnings. Artemis could obtain important information almost as fast as Foaly's best hacking attempts, but unlike the centaur, he had a tendency to hold that information back until he was absolutely certain of its accuracy.
"What information?" Foaly sounded incredibly suspicious, as per usual when Artemis was about to drop a metaphorical bombshell on them.
The Mud Boy hummed thoughtfully. "During supper, in lieu of having actual presents for the twins, Frisk offered to answer any questions they may have about the monsters or their history that hadn't already been answered. Their initial question concerned the individuals responsible for construction of the Barrier, more specifically what their magic may have been like, and while answering, the Ambassador hinted it was a possibility for humans in today's society to still possess magic."
"What? But there haven't been humans with magic since -"
"And, more intriguingly," Artemis continued calmly, not acknowledging the centaur's interruption, "the conversation was quickly turned towards the topic of souls – more specifically, soul colors that represent certain personality traits. Most humans apparently have multiple said colors, but the souls of the humans responsible for the Barrier had only a single hue – as did the souls of all eight human children that fell into the Underground, including Frisk – and, apparently, humans possessing a single-colored soul are more likely to develop magic.
"With this in mind," he continued, and Holly could almost see him steepling his fingers as he spoke, "if we look at what we already know, then we have a very interesting series of events. A human child with a single-colored soul falls through the Barrier, a massive magical construction, into an underground kingdom full of ambient magic. They make their way through the entire Underground, miraculously avoiding permanent harm despite monsters attacking them at every turn, at times almost seeming to predict what certain monsters will do. As they do, they pass through several locations which later show odd magical readings whose cause is unknown. Once they reach the surface once more, they become the monster ambassador and somehow manage to evade multiple attempts on their life that they should have no knowledge of, eventually culminating in them reacting oddly to the unusual magical signatures and then shortly afterwards somehow acquiring the knowledge of assassination attempts days or only hours previous to them occurring."
There was a long moment of silence.
"Are you saying," Holly said slowly, "that the monster Ambassador has magic?"
"It is certainly a possibility, yes."
"But humans don't –"
"Foaly," Holly interrupted. "Four words. Artemis. Hybras. Time tunnel."
"That's different!" Foaly blustered. "That proves that humans can use magic, yes, but that's not the same thing as having it naturally! Artemis stole that magic, he didn't develop it on his own, and we would've noticed if some humans started healing themselves or shooting fireballs everywhere – "
"Humans are not necessarily limited to what fairies are capable of," Artemis pointed out. "If I were to hazard a guess at this point, if Frisk does possess magic, it's likely some form of prophetic ability, which isn't something the People are capable of at this time so far as I know."
Foaly groaned. "D'Arvit, that's even worse than fireballs… this is the kid who might know about the People that we're talking about here –"
He paused. Holly, about to interject with a comment of her own, went quiet as well, a feeling of dread bubbling up in her gut.
That's not a good pause… that's an "everything's about to be chin deep in the troll dung" pause.
"Foaly?" She asked, after a moment longer of silence.
A couple of curse words were her reply a few moments later – a couple of centaurean cusses and at least one d'arvit.
"Strike that. This is the kid who might know about the People and now has a reason to think we might be the enemy that we're talking about here! I don't get paid enough for this..."
"What?!"
"I've been monitoring the Dublin police databases since I saw the news report," the centaur said miserably. "They just updated their information – the two perps were interrogated, and what they said suggests they might have been mesmerized like the first assassin was." He paused again to grumble. "And guess who helped with the interrogation?"
Holly swallowed. "Was it – was it Undyne?"
"Got it in one. The very same monster who's shared police info with the Ambassador before, and would probably do it again. And if she does, and our little 'prophet' learned about the mesmer from Flowey…"
They'll know that it was a fairy responsible for this attempt on their life, and that's more than enough of a reason to consider us a threat… and if the monster Ambassador considers us a threat… then the monsters will too.
D'Arvit, what did we ever do to deserve this?
Technically speaking, Artemis and Co. aren't exactly WRONG about Frisk having magic - they do have magic. It just hasn't started developing properly yet, and right now is more of a passive ability – it's what allows Frisk to be aware of the naturally-occurring SAVE points. However, that's pretty much ALL it does at this point – Frisk isn't like their Red Shaman ancestor, who could create SAVE points as well as use them, and they're certainly not someone with future-sight in the conventional sense of the word. Most of what they do with the SAVE points depends upon their Determination, not their magic.
Speaking of Determination, today's worldbuilding, from a question asked by MemorySteel, is about Determination: more specifically, "Is DT a form of magic?"
I'm guessing by Determination you mean the substance produced by human souls, and not the soul-trait itself. TECHNICALLY speaking, DT is not a form of magic, since it is something that all humans possess in at least small quantities, and magic is something very few humans have. However, Determination does affect the odds of someone having magic, as well as the strength of said magic! Humans such as Frisk or Chara, who have massive amounts of DT, are considerably more likely to develop strong magic than, say, a shy little kid with very little Determination. That being said, magic is not a 100% guarantee even with highly Determined humans - the only way to guarantee that such a human could develop magic is if they had a single colored soul, and came into contact with a massive amount of magical energy... enough energy to, say, equal seven human souls? Just a hypothetical example, of course, and if said hypothetical example were true, then it would also hypothetically take a fair length of time for the magic to develop to the point where it was capable of being controlled by the new mage... and hypothetically the Resets would get in the way of that... :3