"...Seriously, all I did was pull a lever. I'm not four, Tori, you don't have to pretend everything I do impresses you," I complained in a completely respectful tone without a hint of sarcasm. At all.
"I only said you were a fast learner!" she said defensively.
"I mean, you're not wrong, but..."
I impatiently tapped my foot, leaning against the wall wearing my usual scowl on my face, angrily wondering aloud why I had to be educated on the time-honored art of pulling a lever. "Just because the last switch you threw freaked the hell out doesn't mean every single lever is suddenly a death trap," I snapped.
Tori sighed, tilting her head to avoid my glare. "I suppose you're right, my chi- I mean, young one, although I made those hints long before you arrived here," she said solemnly.
"I wouldn't exactly call those 'hints.'"
Not even five minutes and only one room after Tori nearly squashed me with a door and somehow we'd already ended up arguing over nothing. From what I'd seen so far, the Ruins were filled to the brim with puzzles that an autistic second grader could solve in under two seconds. Which, to Toriel, meant that even Einstein couldn't complete them without her gracious assistance.
The room was long and thin, with a light chill blowing through now and again, sending goosebumps up my arms. Thick forest-green vines wildly clawed at the cracks lining the walls, adding to the ancient vibe I was already gathering from this place. Even the aqueducts running beside me were old and sluggish, partially clogged by the vines' rejected leaves turned a muddy brown. Judging by what I'd seen so far, Tori was pretty shit at her job of 'caretaker.' But even I wasn't enough of an asshole to say that to her face.
Now, complaining about her treating me like I was three, that i could do.
The path forward was blocked a row of razor-sharp spikes. God, I can imagine the conversation that went on between the dolts that thought that was a good addition to the decor of this place. "Ey, Blumesworth, this room's looking fabulous, absolutely fabulous, but what if...we added a set of giant-ass spikes riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight...there!"
"Brilliant idea, Charles old chap, we'll get right on it."
Naturally, the only way to clear them was to pull a few levers. Apparently Toriel thought a lever-pulling puzzle was way too complicated for us simple-minded humans, so she wrote, "Please press this switch," next to each one in big bold yellow letters with arrows uselessly pointing the lever beside it. She even hung a fake picture of one at the far end of the room in a feeble attempt of actually challenging anyone.
And because I was so impossibly charming, I blew up at her for it.
"Very well, I promise I'll provide absolutely no assistance to any puzzle from now on, okay?" she swore, bending down so we were at equal eye-level.
I nodded and pushed off the wall. "Good." Figuring I won the argument, I stomped across the planks of wood bridging across the aqueducts, throwing the last switch without even glancing at it and tearing the fake lever off the wall for good measure. The spikes retracted right on cue, and we continued on to the next room.
The though of ditching Tori and finding my own way through the ruins crossed my mind. It'd sure as hell save me a lot of useless information and pointless explanations, and (if you couldn't guess by now) I wasn't exactly one for travel partners. Or help from another living being of any kind. As far as I was concerned, there were three kinds of people in this world: those that were useless, those that were annoying, or if you were really lucky, you might just find a combination of both. So far, Toriel was definitely fitting into my 'annoying' category smoothly.
On the other hand...there's a tiny chance that rushing forward blindly in unfamiliar territory might be slightly more dangerous than getting the help of someone who knows the place inside and out. Especially a friendly goat-lady with the ability to summon giant fireballs at will, with the added bonus of being able to put up with my bullshit. Very, very few people possessed that talent. Hell, even I would've left myself to rot in the Ruins by now, and she even went as far as to save my life. So maybe sticking it out with her a little longer couldn't hurt too much.
It could always be worse, I told myself. She could've been a combination.
"Hold on a moment, my child-oh, darn it!" Toriel called after me. She quickly cut me off and planted her feet in front of the room's exit, her brow furrowed. I couldn't figure why, since the room was about the size of my attention span with the only object of interest a worn out training dummy sitting against the far wall.
"What's the hold-up, my child?" I hissed, twirling my weapon of choice, the almighty stick, in my right hand, trying desperately to pretend it was a katana or something akin to an actual weapon.
Tori giggled. "I appreciate the complement, but I haven't been a child in a long time."
Was this woman physically unable to detect sarcasm? "Could've fooled me," I muttered.
She cleared her throat. "As a human living in the Underground, monsters may attack you."
Oh, that's why.
"Yeah, I kinda figured that much out back with the killer sunflower." As much as I tried to play it off, something about being relentlessly hunted by killer monsters disturbed me. Besides the part about being relentlessly hunted by killer monsters.
...Monsters living in the Underground...
...Where had I heard that before?
"Any particular reason they want my head? Aside from it looking great on their mantles, of course," I said smugly.
Tori clicked her tongue and lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. "Well, it's quite a long story, young one. If you don't mind, I'd rather wait until we're somewhere safer before discussing that," she said distantly, and without a hint of worry in her voice, filling me in on how that wasn't at all the reason she wasn't telling me. I let her keep talking though, just because I knew opening my big mouth again would only slow us down. "Needless to say, you will need to be prepared to defend yourself. However, worry not!" She put on a bright smile in an attempt to snuff out my nonexistent concern. "The process is quite simple."
Tori curled her hands at the front of her robe and blinked, fixing her posture. When she spoke again, she used the same tone as your typical history teacher, except somehow sounding even more disinterested. "When you encounter a monster, you will enter a fight."
I raised an eyebrow. "Right, and then I smack 'em around with this a couple times," I interrupted, swinging at the air in front of me as if I was an old lady living at a retirement home, and it had just interrupted my frigging' Saturday morning bingo game. I had next to no experience with any weapon, be it sword or stick, of any kind, but I figured I could still do some damage as long as I swung it hard enou-
"-No, no, of course not!" Tori chastised. I whipped my head around, shooting her my patented 'what the hell did you just say to me' look.
"Pardon?"
Tori lost any and all professionalism in her posture. She shifted from foot to foot, back and forth, ear twitching uncomfortably. Apparently my one comment had utterly destroyed her confidence. "We don't want to hurt anyone, do we...?"
That caught me off guard, like a sucker punch to the large intestine. She could've said, "injuring monsters will cause giant mutant camels to fly down to the heavens to impregnate you with the child of the sun," and I would've come out less confused.
"Strike up a friendly conversation," she continued, unphased by my dumbfounded expression. "I will come to resolve the conflict."
I couldn't begin to wrap my head around that. The last time I tried to get chummy, or rather, avoid getting chummy with one of the Underground's inhabitants didn't end so well. Hell, Tori had been there to see it. I'd made no move showing any hostility towards that damn, damn hell spawn of a flower, and what did he do? Stab me in the back. Same as usual.
And now she was asking me to do it all over again.
"Are you alright, young one?" Tori fretted, kneeling down besides me. She did her best to comfort me without getting too close, although I honestly wouldn't have even noticed at the time.
Kill or be killed. We wouldn't want to hurt anyone. The words fired at and clashed with each other, an all-out war all taking place on a battlefield in my brain. Or as Flowey would've corrected me, my soul.
"...As always, I'm fine," I said as calmly as possible.
Tori visibly lit up. "Splendid," she sang, clearly delighted I hadn't retorted or snapped at her with some cheep throw-away insult for once. She sprang to her feet and gestured to the pathetic training dummy sitting in the corner. "Perhaps you'd like to practice on this dummy?"
Good thing there was eternally enough Tori naivety to pull me back to reality. I crossed my arms and looked at her with my eyes hanging half-open accusatory. "You did not just as me to 'strike up a friendly conversation' with a training dummy."
"Oh, it's really quite simple," she assured. "If you want, I could tell you one of my favorite ice-breaker jokes."
Oh, this oughta be good. "Shoot," I encouraged.
Tori seemed to be brimming with excitement at the thought of sharing one of her jokes with me. She had this weird spark in her eye that I swear hadn't been there before. "What does a skeleton pave his roof with?"
"Gee, I wonder."
"Shin-gles!" she said, ecstatic.
I gave what was the only plausible response for a joke of that quality; a completely emotionless, blank stare of utter disbelief.
Tori didn't let that slow her down. "Oh come on, have a heart!" she exclaimed, furiously pointing at my chest.
That one at least earned a reaction, although it probably couldn't have been farther from humorous. I glanced down, my eyes immediately catching the bright red heart protruding from my rib cage. My "soul." I'd honestly forgotten about it with all the...lets call it, "excitement," going on since I'd woken up in the Underground. So far it hadn't done much but sat there and contemplate its life choices in its free time, and even now it still seemed pretty insignificant. The very culmination of my being was pretty boring, to be honest.
Toriel recoiled harshly when I ignored her joke. "Well, I found it amusing..." she muttered. "How about-"
"-No!" I jolted back to attention. "Nope, I'm good, ready to have a long philosophical encounter with a training dummy," I interrupted, pushing past her and lining up face-to-face with my...opponent, I guess.
The training dummy was worn, sullen, and falling apart at the seems as if it'd been standing here since the beginning of time. Just smacking and taking this thing out would probably be a bigger kindness than anything I could ever come up with to say to it. But pissing off Tori would only serve to backfire on me, so I locked "eyes" with it, which were really just a pair stitches marked in an X shape, and played my ultimate conversation-starter trump card.
"How ya doing?" I asked. The dummy didn't respond.
Shocker.
"Seen any good movies lately?" Again, no response. It, surprisingly, didn't seem much for conversation. "All right, Phil, see ya around."
Feeling about as comfortable as a fly caged in a Venus fly trap, I turned back toward the exit to find Tori beaming at me. "Ah. Very good, you are very good..." she trailed off, talking more to herself than me. Then she disappeared into the next room without another word.
But could I do the same against the actual threats, the monsters lurking in the Ruins? If they turned out to all be hell-spawns like Flowey, there was a fart's chance in the wind I could actually talk them into letting me go. And while I acted like I could handle myself, which I could, I hadn't really seen my fair share of fights, at least by city kid standards. My mind instinctively jumped to the worst case scenario, filling up the empty halls of the Ruins with images of giant killer insects or some kind of ancient Greek monsters, as well as some of my own abominations I could take several haunting hours to describe.
Then again...if someone as sweet as Toriel was asking me to put myself at further risk just to avoid hurting them, then they couldn't be all that bad. Or, if I could kill them with a stick, at least not very tough.
For what seemed like the millionth time, I drifted back to my first encounter with Flowey. This time, though, I used his cruel words to motivate me.
I narrowed my eyes and hopped up on the balls of my feet, charging after Toriel. I'd prove that flower wrong. I was determined to make it out of here alive without harming, or at least killing, a single soul. Even if they were combinations.
...Of course, my foot promptly caught on something with perfect comedic timing, and I tripped, nearly tumbling face-fist into the ground.
Reacting quickly to my own stupidity, I tossed the stick out my hand and used my momentum to shoulder-roll back onto my feet, the only pain coming from the preexisting bruises spread across my back. I should've asked Toriel to heal those for me, but it was too late now.
I scrambled to grab hold of my almighty stick once again, simultaneously checking to see what my foot had snagged on.
What I found nearly made me burst out laughing.
Sitting just besides the doorway I'd entered from was a snow white frog-like creature about as tall as my shins, clutching it's head with both stubby arms right where I assumed I had kicked it. Other than it's shape, though, I couldn't immediately pin any other similarities between it and regular frogs.
...Or any other living being. The thing stared blankly at me with eyes completely devoid of emotion, let alone pupils, practically unmoving, like a stuffed animal. It might've actually creeped me out if I hadn't been actively preparing myself for the worst.
I was about to write it off as something I could ignore entirely, until it let out a hearty "Ribbit!" and leaped straight at me. It's assault caught me completely off guard, sending us toppling over one another on the hard stone floor. My elbow bashed the ground, sending shivers of pain rattling up my bones.
I cried out angrily, wildly flailing my other arm in an attempt to fling the thing off me. Thankfully, my uninjured arm was the stick-wielding one. I smacked at the frog repeatedly with the "hilt" of the stick. Surprisingly, it only took a couple blows to its head before it hopped off, repositioning itself further away from me with another, now saddened "Ribbit!"
I painstakingly rose to my feet, clutching my injured elbow with my good arm. I examined it as quickly as possible in fear of another sneak-attack. My skin where I had landed was already a deep shade of black and blue, and needless to say, it hurt like hell. I didn't have to be a medical expert to tell I'd fractured something. Easily.
Any courage I'd built up over the past couple of minutes was replaced by blind rage. Boiling blood rushed to my face. I think it was about time this overgrown amphibian learned a thing or two about mankind.
"You just messed with the wrong human," I yelled in true action-movie-hero fashion. The beast responded by letting loose a swarm of equally white flies from its mouth.
Gross.
They snaked towards me in varying patterns in an attempt to cut off any means of evasion. Little did they know, they sucked at it. For the first wave, all I did was lean to the right and the insects sped right past my head without even veering off course in the slightest. In the split second they were right in front of my face, I noticed they weren't even really flies, so much as little white specks with the outline of wings.
Little white..."friendliness pellets?" Did everything down here attack with those?
Whatever, no time to wonder about the questionable battle tactics of glorified toads. The rest of its attack was actually on target, albeit with plenty of room to dodge. I vaulted over a few and flipped over in mid air to land hands-down to the floor, then pushing off and springing over the last wave of them and back onto my feet, only stumbling in the slightest. Although I owe that entirely to holding on to the stick the whole time. And maybe the giant bruise on my elbow that, if not for the adrenaline, would be killing me right about now.
It took me a second a few breaths to gather to gather myself. When I glanced forward, I found the frog had somehow already backed itself into a corner without me even lifting a finger at it, stuck between a hard place and another hard place. It trembled and shook in fear, apparently fresh out of ideas already. With a frown of disgust, I noticed it's actual eyes were stuck on a dangling black sack that closely resembled...actually, never mind.
"Scared, froggy?" I taunted, twirling my weapon around like a baton. Then, as I narrowed my eyes, "'Cause you should be."
Just as I was about to lunge forward and bring the pain, however, I felt something firm grasp my shoulder from behind, holding me back. I spun around, wincing when I found Toriel's gaze sweeping back and forth between me and the frog, a disapproving glare in her eyes and a tightly knit scowl as if she'd caught two schoolboys fighting at recess.
For some reason, I completely locked up. There was something in the way she eyed me in combination with the hold she had on me that denied any sort of resistance. And for reasons I couldn't explain, that annoyed me beyond comprehension.
Without another word spoken by anyone, the frog turned and nervously hopped away back the way I'd came, turning around to look at me one last time before disappearing around the corner.
Was that thing trying to get me to feel bad for it? Fat chance of that, but Toriel probably had plans to do the same.
At that thought, Tori's spell over me finally dissipated. "The hell was that about!?" I snapped, brushing her hand off my shoulder.
"I simply wanted no further harm to come to you or that creature," she stated plainly, in that obnoxious tone adults scolded you in to make it feel like you were below them. Which she damn well knew by now that it wouldn't work on me.
"What you did was-" I paused mid sentence. Why the hell was I mad again? All Toriel had done was help me fulfill my promise to myself not to kill anything, and I was placing imaginary blame on her. Regardless of my temper, pushing away the one reason I was still walking and breathing would likely be one of the biggest mistakes of my life, and if I kept this up, it might be a reality. It took all of my will power, but I painstakingly decided to drop the argument. Just this once. "-Actually...pretty justified," I muttered, forcing myself to cool off.
She nodded softly. "I should have intervened sooner, but I wanted to see how you would handle the situation," she sighed. "I suppose you were only acting in self defense...for the most part." Her eyes closed, and she pulled her hands close to her chest. "But I couldn't let you do something you'd soon regret-"
"-Tori, I promise next time I get jumped, I'll try things your way, alright?" I said quickly, desperately trying to get her to shut up and have us moving again.
Tori raised her head to look at me, seeming pleased. Once again, mistook my hostility for friendliness. Somehow. "Thank you, my..." she trailed off. "Let us keep moving."
She turned and once again took off at her usual pace of way-too-fast.
"Toriel!" I called after her.
I swear I could hear the screech of car brakes as she came to a stop and looked over her shoulder. "Yes?"
I avoided her gaze, scratching at the bridge of my nose. God, I was going to regret this... "...You can call me 'my child.' If you really want too."
That might've been the happiest I've ever made someone in the span of eleven words. Her ecstatic smile said it all. "Very well, my child," she whispered. "If that makes you happy."
It really doesn't, I thought, but she certainly seemed delighted. All according to plan. So I went along with it, following her deeper into the Ruins.
...Right up until the pain in my elbow returned full-force. "Uh, Toriel, hold on a sec!"