Cork paced back and forth across the snow-sprinkled front porch of the Dreemurr. He was not nervous. Hah. Of course he was nervous! He was going to talk to his new boss, his new boss' girlfriend, the King, the Queen, and the Prince of Monsters, his sibling's honorary Dunkle, the first monster friend he had ever made, and his sibling the freaking Ambassador of Monsterkind! He was probably forgetting someone or just plain didn't know about them. It wouldn't be the first time. Hopefully this time would go better than the last. He still felt sorry for the poor Temmie who was allergic to him. Poor monster.

The other reason, besides his nerves, that Cork was pacing back and forth on the front porch in his fatigues and boots was that he was waiting for the alarm on his phone to go off. The alarm was one he trusted more than anything else. It told him when it was socially acceptable to knock on people's doors. He, much like his first monster friend, Papyrus, thought that sleep was a horrible thing that only happened to other people.

As it turned out Cork didn't need to knock, because someone opened the door. It was a kid he recognized from pictures as Prinx Chara. Wasn't they supposed to be dead? Then again, so was Asriel, so maybe he shouldn't judge.

The Prinx blinked at him a few times, then let one of the craziest grins he'd ever seen cross their face. They turned back to the house and shouted, "Hey, Frisk! Silver! Your brother's here!"

"Silver?" Cork said, "Who's that? Also, how do you know who I am? And aren't you dead?"

Chara turned back to face him and smiled even wider. Their smile split in a laugh that sounded so cynical for a child. He definitely needed to reread his history book. "Wow, you've got a lot of catching up to do. Mom's in the kitchen. I've got to run down to Gerson's to get Silver some crab apples. Don't touch my knife and we'll be fine."

With that frightening comment the child skipped down the front path towards the main road. Cork tried to process their speech for a moment, reached the crab apples, and hollered after them, "Pick up an order of the apples for me, too!"

Cork pulled his beanbag out of storage and carried it into the downstairs living room. Then he sat on it. It was still way too big for him. Toriel had bought way too much of the camo fabric for him and insisted on using it all. Then he stared at the child across from him. She was… small. Fragile. Distinctive. Just like Frisk, it looked like this sister was going to be easy to pick out of a crowd, provided the crowd was short enough. Next to them, Frisk and Asriel were sitting and holding hands. He wasn't ready to process that yet. He was still working on Silver.

"So… my parents didn't stop being the literal definition of people who shouldn't have kids, got involved in a cult, and never told you your name so you had to pick your own?" Cork tried to summarize.

"Spatula," Silver said tonelessly.

"What?"

"They named me Spatula. Everyone said I could pick a new name, so I did. I can show you the story I picked it from if you want? Mom had me write it down when she taught me to write," Silver said, still toneless. He knew better than to hold that against them. Emotions were hard.

"Well, Silver's definitely better than Spatula! Was that all they did to you?" Cork asked without thinking his question through. Frisk and the Prince's gasps warned him, but it was too late.

Silver described in detail what "the Keepers" had done to her. He felt himself getting more and more mad. Eventually he couldn't handle it anymore. He reached into his inventory and pulled something out. It was a sheet of corkboard. Silver watched in fascinated silence as he tore it into tiny little shreds. Then he looked back up at her and smiled sadly. "Sorry. I was pi- mad at them for doing that to you. I needed to get it out of my system. Dunkle Sans suggested I use corkboard, once. I think the suggestion was a joke, but this actually works really well."

Silver's eyes went funny for a second, like a pair of black sockets were being overlaid on them. Before he could so much as wonder Silver smiled and said, "Consolas says you look healthier. Oh. He says I shouldn't have said that. Now he's doing the hand face thing. Now he's saying to just say hi."

Cork blinked. "Um… I think I need some more explanations now."

Azzy took his turn at this. "You know how Frisk can manipulate time and you can manipulate space? Well, it seems that she can manipulate souls. Not as in control them, but as in absorb them and temporarily stop them from breaking. Or. Um, not so temporarily. She has five guest souls in with her. Consolas is a skeleton who worked with the Feds. Usik is a Knight Knight teenager with an authority problem, Nessa and Nyssa are twin cousins of Undyne, and the baby is a ghost that can only manage words sometimes. We're not testing out the rest of her powers yet because they're all mixed up in monster magic."

Cork frowned slightly. "Consolas… wasn't he that Agent who lost their partner in a mage kid blowup and went rogue?"

"Rogue is stretching it. Stupidly suicidal, yes. Rogue, no," A different voice said, coming out of Cork's sister. He jerked and stared into those black eye sockets again. One winked. "We met at that stupid trust building excercise in Fiji, didn't we? That hike made me hurt worse than dying."

Cork groaned, "I know, right? Who the he-ck came up with that one? And, uh… dying?"

"The Smiley Man who ran the compound beat me to a pulp. Silver pulled me inside her to keep me safe. He took my body to a different part of the compound and killed me. She thought I was being healed, poor kid," Consolas explained.

"Shit, shit- sheesh, I need to stop swearing. Please don't remember that word!" Cork pleaded.

"It is not the worst of words that Silver knows, Diplomat," A new voice said behind him. He turned. There were three more kids he didn't recognize standing behind him. One was wearing a blue trench coat that was way too big for them. Another had Native American features - Cherokee, maybe - and a cowboy hat. The last kid had glasses on that magnified their eyes so much that they looked like black orbs.

"O… kay. I take it this is more of the catching up I need to do?" Cork asked.

Cork was laying on the floor of his new apartment surrounded by those little erasable whiteboards. He was scribbling on another one. Each board had the notes on one new person he had met. He'd take pictures of them on his phone later. It was the only system that actually worked for him.

"Okay, so Minori is Japanese-African American and escaped from a Japanese internment camp in the US during WWII. They/them pronouns. They promised Toriel snails and died trying to get them. 6th human to fall into the Underground," He said to himself as he wrote.

He sat back and scratched his head, staring at the many boards in front of him. "Okay, I've got a lot of studying up to do."

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