When four Bridge Seeds align in the water, they will sprout.
That's too bad, I thought, I was getting super excited to hop back in the water again.
Ignoring the god-awful chafing courtesy of my drenched clothes and taking the sign's advice, I plucked up one of the bridge seeds and tossed it in the river obscuring my way forward, watching as it floated to the other side. Three more seeds later and the plants bloomed into a tightly woven series of bright pink flowers hovering over lily pads. I shifted my weight onto the first flower to test if it would hold me, and was relieved to see it hardly crippled under me at all. Flowers in the underground must be genetically engineered to be badass or something, these ones in particular feeling strong as bungee cords rather than the fragile petals of a flower. I crossed the gap with no problems.
Just as I was beginning to notice the cave walls growing slightly darker and darker as I went deeper in, a faint blue glow began to illuminate the dusty cavern. I nearly trampled over the source of the light, a pair of blue mushrooms that shared the same color as the echo flower from before. But these were translucent, looking more like a pair of jellyfish than mushrooms, emanating that same glow that filled the empty spaces around me. There were a whole bunch of them growing out of the cracked floor like weeds.
"Better than yanking up dandelions..." I muttered, grabbing at another bridge seed. The path was blocked, as usual, by another body of water, which meant I had some more beginner's basic bridge building to do. About halfway through my endeavors, something incredible happened. My cell phone actually rang. After all this time sitting around wasting space, it finally had a purpose. I carefully pulled it out of my pocket while balancing the bridge seed in the other hand, immediately recognizing Papyrus' number flashing across the embarrassingly tiny screen. I found myself hesitant to answer at first after overhearing Papyrus' one-sided conversation with Undyne. (One-sided for Undyne, I mean. Even though Paps was the one talking, he wasn't in control of that dialogue.) Was he calling to warn me of the danger, or trying to sell me out to his superiors?
Eventually, I forced myself to hit the answer button and set the phone on speaker so I could continue my work. "What's up, Paps?"
"Hello! This is - oh, you already know." His voice came out distorted and messy over the phone's crappy speaker, but I was still able to make out what he was saying. Barely. "So...what are you wearing...?"
A visible frown crossed my face, even though I knew he couldn't see it. "Look Papyrus, I'm not playing dumb for you. I saw you talking to Un-"
"SHHH-SH-SHHHHH." Papyrus' attempt to shush me sounded so malformed by the speaker it threatened to make my ears bleed. "Please, tell me," he whispered slowly. "What are you wearing?"
This time, I could practically hear him winking at me through the phone. He's still on my side. A grin erupted onto my face like a volcano. "Oh, nothing out of the ordinary," I continued, doing my best to hide the sarcasm in my voice for once. For all I knew, Undyne could be lumbering over the skeleton, listening in on every word. "Just an...old, dusty tutu..." Okay, maybe something a little more believable than that. "...Sandals, a T-shirt, and I've got my baseball cap on backwards. As usual."
Silence on the other end. Then, "Got it! Thanks, friend!" The phone clicked, and the call was dropped. Just in time for me to complete my bridge of flower and head across.
Papyrus' dedication to throw off Undyne, his superior who frankly wouldn't hesitate to kick his skinny ass into next week for disobeying her, amazed me. Would've creeped me out a bit too, if we were talking about any other person in the universe. Undyne could've thrown in an extra million gold on top of a spot on the Royal Guard and endless admiration, and Papyrus undoubtedly would give it up to help me. He was a friend. Wish I could've said something like that for anyone back on the surface. Or even myself.
"Stop right there, human!"
Oh great, another wannabe Phantom of the Opera.
The challenging cry belonged to, what else, another monster with biology so confusing scientists would tear their own hair out trying to figure why nature was so...horrifically kind to it? Some parts of the beast were too surgically perfect, and other parts seemed slapped together like an eight year old's science project. Needless to say it was...difficult to describe.
Best place to start was the head, I guess, shaped like a horse's with a...for lack of a better word "glorious" mane flowing in the nonexistent breeze, glued to a body sporting pecs bigger than my head and more abs than I could count. Nothing too crazy, aside from the fact this jacked-as-hell guy didn't stand on any legs, but the tail of a mermaid.
...No, seriously, it was just sitting on top of its folded fish tail like a gross, scaly, albeit colorful chair, cycling through flexing poses like a body builder trying to impress women, because nothing in that brain of his would ever be enough on its own. If the monsters I encountered kept scaling up their weirdness at this rate, I'd be fighting flying sharks with turtle shells and laser cannons for eyes before long.
"You realize I could literally just take a leisurely stroll and still outrun you, right, Fish-Legs?" I asked. "Now, if flexing could help you run a marathon, then you'd be business."
The heroic smirk worn on its face deteriorated faster than my ability to care. "Oh."
"Nice biceps, though." Just like that, I left the bastard child of a body-building horse and...merman contemplating it's purpose to exist.
I found myself in the dimmest room yet, so dark I could barely make out my own hand in front of my face. Without those radioactive mushrooms lighting the way, I worried I would have to feel my way along the wall to avoiding tripping into anymore puddles of water. Or monsters, for that matter. Thankfully, the way forward was marked by a series of sparkling blue crystals, maybe sapphires, embedded in the roof of the cave. They twinkled like a discount set of stars.
"...A long time ago, monsters would whisper their wishes to the stars in the sky."
The voice came so monotonous and distant I doubted it had ever existed in the first place, and I was simply losing my mind in the dark corners of Waterfall. But moments later, I heard it again, each syllable ringing like a meticulous note from a music box, closer this time. "If you hoped with all your heart, your wish would come true."
Sounds like the lazy introduction to a half-assed fairy tale, but where the hell is it coming from?
With my arms outstretched in front of me, I eventually bumped into the speaker. At first, a burst of anxiety clasped around my heart, until I realized my fingers were sliding over the smooth surface of a flower petal. An echo flower, to be exact.
"Now, all we have are these sparkling stones on the ceiling..." The voice trailed off like the end of a song, until the recording reset itself moments later.
Making wishes under the stars? Been there, done that, and hadn't since I was about five. The idea of wishing your problems away had seemed childish, let alone pointless, to me for almost as long as I could remember. As if there were some magic force thousands of miles above the sky willing and ready to solve your problems for you at the snap of their fingers. As if were that easy. You had to have fallen to a serious level of desperation or just plain stupidity to stoop to that level, a point even I hadn't hit yet, especially since finding that snowman had reignited my desire to escape Ebott. Granted, if I'd been stuck living underground for the last however many hundred years, I probably would've hit absolute rock-bottom, too.
Pushing past the flower, I continued feeling my way through the cave, until another voice battered its way into my head. "Thousands of people wishing together can't be wrong. The king will prove that."
Thousands?! God, had every frigging spirit in the Underground been chewed up and spit out? The monsters I had come across hadn't exactly seemed cheery for the most part, but had they really all bought into this wishing bullcrap? Where was Papyrus when ya needed him...
Two more voices infiltrated my ears. "C'mon sis. Make a wish."
"I wish my sister and I will see the real stars someday..."
Now they almost had me believing it was a bit more than a myth. Either that or the passerby were kids using the wishing propaganda to help keep themselves dreaming. To keep the weight of the world, in this case the tons and tons of rocks and stone hanging above them everyday like and eerie mist, from crushing them. Kind of a downer when you stop to think about it.
One last echo flower stood in the corner of the room. "Ah...seems my horoscope is the same as last week."
Welp, good thing I can always count on random Underground happenings to lift me out of a shitty mood.
I turned a corner, sidling between two walls a little too close for comfort, until the rock opened up into a somewhat less claustrophobic room, letting out a forced breath of relief. I thanked the fake stars Waterfall wasn't as tightly knit as I'd expected. Being sandwiched between two sharp, damp, and massive stone walls didn't feel all too comforting. Even though I knew it was an irrational waste of thought, I couldn't help but envision the walls caving in, trapping me for all eternity. Sort of conflicted with my current plans. Just a bit.
The squeaks and groans of rotting woods sounded from beneath my feet, and I realized I wasn't on the cave floor anymore. An old boardwalk stretched out over a reservoir of water that had collected below me, gradually flowing away in different directions. If there was one thing consistent about Waterfall, it was the presence of water, whether it was visible in rivers or clinging to the walls, audible by the light, trickling echo as it spilled against the walls of the cavern, or just flat-out trying to kill me. It was an awkward shift from being constantly surrounded by the more obvious nature of snow, but at least Waterfall had retained Snowdin's numbing cold, enough to make me want to tear my own skin off. You know.
In case I got too comfortable. Better to keep alert and on my toes at all times, right?
...So cold...
I took a few hasty steps forward, my trust for the shoddily nailed-together boardwalk waning, but something stopped me. After a sudden turn right, the path forward laid parallel to a series of plaques jutting out of the wall. Forgetting my uncertainty for the planks of wood, I curiously approached the first plaque in the line. Once I drew close, I no longer had any doubts about what it was. It was nearly identical to the plaque in the Ruins, right down to the thin layer of dust coating it like the moisture coating the walls of the cavern. "Only the fearless may proceed. Brave ones, foolish ones, both walk not the middle road," I recited, dragging my hand along the surface of the tablet to clear it. Sure enough, like a wound from a knife, markings were carved into the marble, and words bled out from behind them.
"The War of Humans and Monsters." I said it aloud, because the meaning excited me too much to keep it in my head. Finally! This was the kind of stuff I'd been searching for in the Snowdin Library, at Toriel's house even. Not a single one of those history books touched more on the war that cast the monsters into the Underground, aside from, "There was a war. The end." Unable to contain myself, I moved to the next plaque and began to read aloud:
Why did the humans attack? Indeed, it seemed that they had nothing to fear. Humans are unbelievably strong. It would take the SOUL of nearly every monster just to equal the power of one human SOUL.
The text ran dry, and I scurried over to the next plaque to continue reading. A flicker in the back of my mind urged me to slow down, but I cast it aside.
But humans have one weakness. Ironically, it is the strength of their SOUL. Its power allows it to persist outside the human body, even after death.
I wanted to stop and process the weight of what I had just read, but it was no use. The wounds were bleeding so profusely now they began to flow together in one huge blur.
If a monster defeats a human, they can take their SOUL. A monster with a human SOUL...A horrible beast with unfathomable power.
A horrific monster, a festering wound, something beyond life itself, is scratched into the last plaque. Humans plant themselves around the crumpled, yet familiar, beast, thrusting their primitive spears into them again and again. Soon it's writhing on the ground in pain, but the humans are without mercy. They don't stop until the beast's pathetic breaths halt, its body lay shriveled and withered like an empty husk, and it, like the cold winter night, falls silent. The room is spinning, the rivers are running a warm, sticky red. That same sickening liquid is pouring down my face. Laughter echoes off the walls...
...It's mine?
I violently snapped back to reality, as if waking up from a nightmare. The liquid running down my face was nothing but a rush of sweat. The plaques were no longer bleeding. The river was plain old water again. But I was still laughing coldly. Out of fear.
Finally, the absurdity of my outburst hit me, and my lips slammed shut. My sarcastic edge was completely lost. What the hell is wrong with me? Am I going god-damn insane? I guess anything's possible, considering I'm surrounded by lunatics twenty-four-seven now...
I reached down and grabbed the front of my jacket to dry the sweat off my face, but it was still soaked through, and didn't end up helping much. My pained gasps got caught up in the fabric, and I ended up choking on my own breath. That felt way too much like one of my dreams...maybe I am crazy...or having Undyne stalking me is psyching me out...
"Oh, god." I let the words tumble out in a heavy sigh. All of a sudden, I had no idea what to think. The existence of souls was true enough, evidenced by the red heart that still refused to leave my chest, but persisting after you die? Monsters absorbing human souls? Even compared to everything else, it sounded unbelievable. And maybe it was nothing more than superstition; after all, the text never gave an example of the event. Besides, if a war was fought between the two groups, even if it was started by humans, they had to have taken at least one human life. Surely there would be a clearer depiction of the souls being absorbed, and the transformation itself, if it had really happened. Did that make any sense? Was I making any sense?
And that...vision. Nothing like that had ever come over me before. The gruesome imagery, how real it all felt...and why was I seeing it now? The text hardly went into any detail about the bloodshed, and somehow, it was all I had ended up seeing...
...and I could've sworn I had seen it somewhere before...
Forget it. It was all too overwhelming. The ancient text, my seemingly random dip into insanity...and all I wanted to do now was be alone, away from the haunting words of the plaques, away from the crude illustration of a monster with the power of a human soul. If that even made any sense.
Okay. Okay. On three, I'll move on. Back to my old self. Ready?
One.
Two.
Three.
I took a deep breath, curved my lips into their usual permanent scowl that may not be so permanent anymore, and started off down the boardwalk again. I quickly transitioned back into complaining internally about how rickety and rotten it was, because somehow that helped to shut the grim reality of everything out of my mind.
After walking for a few minutes, the cave began to grow dark again. Shadows extended over the water like storm clouds over an open ocean, turning the water a murky black. Eventually it became so gloomy that everything aside from what was immediately in front of me seemed to disappear. It didn't take very long for loneliness and boredom to creep back in, which formed a path that lead back to my deeper thoughts, which was not something I wanted to return to. Not after my...incident from earlier.
Luckily, I didn't have to stay that way for very long.
I barely had enough time to see the spear hurtling down at me from above, let alone avoid it. But I had caught sight of it at the top of my vision moments before it struck me square in the head, and managed to back-step just in time. The glowing projectile collided with the boardwalk, sending shards of splintered wood splashing into the river below, and scraping against my skin. I threw up my arms to block the pellets from my face, and in that time the spear blinked out of existence without a trace.
"Look, lady, this really isn't a good time!" I yelled, although the adrenaline rushing to my head admittedly felt pretty good after recent events. Wish it didn't have to involve me almost dying, but what're ya gonna do?
Once the wood chips had settled, I spun around to find my attacker, no doubt Undyne. Papyrus had tried, but clearly a fake outfit change wasn't enough to keep the Royal Guardsman from hunting me down. At first, I couldn't find her, until I noticed her sinister glare poking out from the shaded columns across the river, with the rest of her bleak armor becoming apparent afterwards. The platform she stood on ran parallel to the dock, but the two didn't come close enough for me to reach her. As she readied another wave of spears behind her, I realize grimly that I was completely at her mercy.
"Right, I forgot you don't care. My bad." With no way to cover my escape, I took off sprinting farther down the boardwalk, hoping I could leave Undyne in the dust. It was right about then that I remembered why I had decided to stay hidden in the bush when she had spotted me, and my suspicions were confirmed.
Undyne sprinted like a god damn tiger.
The knight had no problem keeping up with my pace, even with the burden of concentrating her aim on me. All I had to focus on was running and dodging, but that proved much more difficult that I had anticipated. In addition to being built thin, the boardwalk would randomly twist & turn and change directions on a dime, as if the monster constructing it couldn't make heads or tails of where it started and where it was supposed to end. I had hardly any room to move, the cave was black as coal, and the spears were flying at me from behind, meaning I had to rely on the sound of them whizzing through the air more than anything else to know what was coming.
To put it in layman's terms, I was totally and utterly fucked.
At least Undyne's aim wasn't great, which was probably why she ended up throwing three or four spears at a time. However, with every spear that missed me or that I ducked or darted out of the way of, it felt like they only started to come faster and faster. What it basically boiled down too was an archer taking a few shots at a target, missing all of them, reloading, rinse and repeat, until he gets so fed up he throws away the bow, pulls out a chain gun, and starts unloading all hell on the target. Lemme tell you: not very fun being the target in that scenario.
One spear passed just by my ear, another threaded the needle between my legs, and a third practically lodged itself in my shoulder blade before abruptly vanishing. The pain stun like acid, but I didn't let the wound slow me down. Every time the boardwalk decided to throw me for a loop and turn with no reason whatsoever, I gauged whether or not I could clear the gap before the walkway returned to its normal position. Nine out of ten times I jumped regardless of what conclusion I came too. My feet scraped the top of the water as I climbed back onto the wood on more than one occasion, but I never once fell in.
C'mon, c'mon, I need a way to break free from this psycho...would be a lot easier if it weren't darker than a supply closet in a blackout...there! The boardwalk was coming to an end up ahead, back in a more enclosed section of the cave where the floor wasn't buried under water. Seeing my ticket out, I cranked it up into my highest gear. The spears had began to sail uselessly past me and over my head, indicating that I had finally begun to leave Undyne in the dust. Another few seconds and the spears stopped coming all together.
"Later...loser!" I yelled behind me. Thinking of decent insults felt next to impossible when you were dedicating one-hundred percent of your energy to not dying. 'Course, it was still a little too soon to be celebrating.
Especially when I heard the sound of metal slamming against wood directly behind me.
Shit, she jumped over. She jumped over. She jumped over. And she's catching up. She's catching up. SHE'S CATCHING UP!
Sounded more like a stampede of rhinos were chasing me rather than just one monster, but that would've been too much to hope for. At least a pack of rhinos would be so heavy they'd fall through the boardwalk. My heart and brain were pounding like pendulums in perfect unison. Where do I go!?
The answer came to me as last-second as possible. More accurately, the answer didn't come to me, I ran head-first into the answer.
A mass of bushes, the same thin, dry ones I had used to hide from Undyne earlier, spread out before me from wall to wall. If I managed to stay hidden from her once, maybe I could pull off that same trick again?
Well, it's either that or be trampled like a gerbil on a highway, so let's take the bushes.
Forcing myself to slow down against every instinct begging me to keep running, I ducked into the thicket and did my best to disappear. Time wasn't exactly on my side, Undyne was only a few moments behind me. I quietly shuffled through the leaves, trying to shift as close to the wall as possible, until my personal stalker marched into the field of bushes without slowing down.
I froze, sucking in one last breath to hold in order to stay as silent and still as possible. There's no way she can see me, I dared to think, but Undyne wasted no time flattening the thick shrubs underneath her heavy armor. I waited for a few seconds, until it became clear she was searching for me aimlessly. Home free...
A flicker of movement appeared a few steps to my left. I had no idea what could have caused it, but at that point, it didn't matter. Undyne snapped her attention to it instantly.
Great. Might as well have lost at roulette three hundred times in a row.
I cursed my luck and sank even deeper into the brush, but Sir Lance-a-lot stood almost directly above me now, so close I could hear her muffled breaths from the inside of her helmet. Fearing the worst, which seemed pretty appropriate by this point, I slipped on my tough glove for a last-ditch effort to defend myself. Alright you glorified tin can, bring it, I challenged, if only to hide from the thought of being impaled and delivered to the king of monsters like a trophy.
Undyne pulled back her armored hand, reached down into the thicket, and grabbed...
...
...something, but it wasn't me.
Instead, she held up none other than her biggest fan, Monster Kid, by the top of his face. Even though it looked like she was crushing his skull, he was smiling wildly, almost shaking in her grasp from excitement. Until she dropped him, that is, and stomped off back the way we had come from in defeat.
At that moment, I had no idea whether I should worship Monster Kid for saving me or blow him off the face of the Earth for nearly getting me killed. When I was absolutely sure Undyne was gone, I slipped out of the brush on the other side, and the little fanboy popped out behind me.
"Yo...did you see that!?" he asked, dancing around like a drunk college student at a particularly shitty party.
Yeah, I saw you almost get me killed...or make her give up?
"Undyne just TOUCHED ME! I'm never washing my face ever again!"
I scoffed at him, turning so that he wouldn't be able to see the gash across my back. "Have fun with the acne problems, then," I warned.
Despite my insult, Monster Kid continued to beam at me. "Aw, you're just jealous you weren't standing where I was!"
"Yep. Super jealous," I nodded.
"Yo, don't worry! I'm sure we'll see her again!" he assured me, which was pretty much the exact opposite of what I wanted to hear. Something along the lines of, "Don't worry, dude, she doesn't patrol this part of Waterfall!" would've been much more appreciated.
Without waiting for a response, he ran off up ahead again, but not before his obligatory face-smearing trip onto the cave floor.
I gave him a couple minutes' head start before following him deeper into Waterfall, hoping that would be the last time I'd see Undyne.
Yeah. Wouldn't that be funny?