The game show's jingle shifted gears to a more sinister tone as if to compliment the higher stakes, crackling and sporadic notes that held on pitches shrill enough to make my skin dance in its discomfort. Frantic, I needed to concentrate on my movements just to keep in place, as far as possible from the equally energetic bolts of electricity trapping me. I squinted over them to the spot Mettaton had placed himself on his makeshift stage, but his attention-desperate waves and blown kisses to the audience weren't what I had been searching for. The good doctor herself had sneaked her way behind the towering hulk of metal, looking near sick in the streak of green light falling against her face...that, or she really was turning green holding back the contents of her stomach. Regardless of how well her intestines were managing, the doctor made an effort to mouth something incoherent to me, then gave a small smile as if to say, 'yeah, I know this is entirely my fault and I maybe should've mentioned the giant death robot sooner, but hey, the situation will probably work itself out for the better, right?'

No, it won't. I'll work through it myself.

"Let's start with an easy one!" The robot skidded to the side, revealing an absurdly oversized monitor along the back wall that certainly hadn't been there a moment earlier. Text began to scroll across an empty space while four letters lit up, each occupying their own panel. Assuming his audience was tragically illiterate, Mettaton repeated the question out loud, "What's the prize for answering correctly? C'mon sweetie, I know you know it!" And the answers appeared:

A. Money

B. Mercy

C. New car

D. More questions

Instead, the answer he got was the bottom of my sneaker hurtling into his proverbial face, its laces singed from the electric wall they sailed over. It bounced off one of the many flashing do-dads on his front, leaving no impact on the big tin can. "Mind holding on to that for me while I consider those lovely choices, sweetie?"

Unperturbed, he tapped a finger against his big, flashy game-board. "I wouldn't be wasting any time on sub-par insults, contestant!" he sang proudly. "Of course, I'm not the one who hasn't any time to spare." I followed his gestures to a bright red number counting down, rapidly approaching single digits. "Besides, throwing sneakers out of frustration is strictly against the rules. They may only be thrown in celebration, anguish, or if the contestant suffers from a severe medical concern."

"Didn't realize shitty taste in footwear was an identifiable condition." I didn't care about the robotic host's regulations, and I especially didn't care to find out what happened when the timer hit zero. "More questions?" I answered tentatively, less than thrilled over being forced to play along.

"Right!" Mettaton buzzed with excitement, accompanied by an ear-bleeding jingle. "Sounds like you get it!"

"Sounds like it, sure, but I'm a very convincing liar..." I thought I had caught a glimpse of Alphys scooching closer to the future scrapheap, but I couldn't be sure. That hardly made sense next to the way she was bent over as if trying to hide from the cameras, looking more like the mad doctor's hunchbacked assistant than the doctor herself.

Mettaton wasn't about to lose any sleep over it. "Here's your terrific prize for answering correctly! What's the king's full name?"

A. Lord Fluffybuns

B. Fuzzy Pushover

C. Asgore Dreemurr

D. Dr. Friendship

To the question's credit, it was at least abstract enough to give me pause. "Pretty sure I've heard Asgore and Fluffybuns tossed around here and there...but 'Fluffybuns' sounds more like the kind of nickname the creepy old guy who's always hanging around the gym would give you. And 'Dr. Friendship' sounds so cheesy you could serve it on a platter with crackers." During my musings I caught Alphys fidgeting strangely on the stage for a second time, now confident she was planning something. Her sweaty palms were clasped together and her fingers appeared stretched outward, contorted in some bizarre shape I couldn't make out. Dismissing it as some half-assed monster prayer for our lives, I gave Mettaton my answer. "C."

"Correct! What a terrific answer!" Despite nailing the quiz show, I hadn't managed to crack the killer bot's cheerful demeanor in the slightest. Driving my head against a wall over and over again would yield a more promising response. "Enough about you. Lets talk about me!"

"You want me to sing you praise?" I sneered. "What am I, your mother? Oh wait, that can't be right. She's over there cowering in the corner."

Alphys let out an audible sigh of defeat as the next question was fired at me. "What are robots made of?"

A. Hopes & Dreams

B. Metal & Magic

C. Snips & Snails

D. Sugar & Spice

"B," I answered almost immediately. It was the only option that made any remote amount of sense. Applying human logic to the Underground's madness was usually a recipe for all flavors of disaster, but me and my stupid instincts were let off the hook this time.

"Too easy for you, huh?" the robot scoffed during the eruption of confetti that followed.

"Unless my math is off, I'm three for three so far." The electric cage hissed at me as if insulted by my confidence. "Why not give it a rest already? Your audience is bound to get bored once they realize your trivia questions are so easy a toddler could've written them."

Mettaton appeared shocked as an emotionless tin can could, every panel on his front face burning to life. "What!? How dare you suggest such senseless slander! The 'ages three and up' show doesn't air until our eight AM time slot! Except of course on the 'MTT kids' channel, where I host all of our wonderful programs for the little tots all day: Mettele Buddies, The Mettsons, The MupMetts..."

While Mettaton rambled off on commercial break, Alphys lurched back to life and crept over to the edge of stage, whispering something in my direction with her hands stretched outwards. "H-hey, I know you're concentrating super hard on answering these questions, b-but if you look at m—"

"—Yep, focusing really hard over here in my little playpen, thanks for the attention."

An emotion bordering distraught and anguish befell Alphys's comical facial features in a none too pretty sight. "B-but..."

Before she could finish her thought, the show's ever charismatic host wrapped up his deliberate prattling to zone in on the human he intended to fry. "...In short, there's no need to fret, dear contestant!" Alphys slunk back to her corner as Mettaton threw his arms skyward. I watched in complete helplessness as my precious thirty seconds trickled away one by one, until the timer was reduced to a measly fifteen. The bot may as well have grabbed at an hourglass and shaken it around so the sand would slip through faster. "I'm just getting started."

A new question appeared before I could catch a breath; by the length of it, Mettaton should've counted himself lucky he didn't have to. "Two trains, Train A, and Train B, simultaneously depart Station A and Station B. Station A and Station B are 252.5 miles apart from each other. Train A is moving at 124.7mph towards Station B, and Train B is moving at 253.5mph towards Station A. If both trains departed at 10:00 AM and it is now 10:08, how much longer until both trains pass each other?"

A. 31.054 minutes

B. 16.232 minutes

C. 32.049 minutes

D. 32.058 minutes.

"Whaa...?" Just the idea of processing the maze of text I had been forcibly tasked with answering caused my brain to stutter. All I could concentrate on was the nervous sheen of sweat trickling down my neck rather than comprehending the problem towering over me. Under that layer of confusion sat a stubborn frustration prodding at what lay above it. How had the situation gone from life-or-death quiz game to a life-or-death math test so quickly? A cursory glance at the timer told me reading the question alone had wasted any time for deliberation. "A? AUGH!"

Time skipped merrily forward without me, and by the time I had caught up with it my skin was flaring in pain. My head spun as a miasma of charred flesh and cloth pervaded my nostrils, leading me to stumble and only barely keep from collapsing to the floor. Resting on one knee, I squinted upward towards Mettaton, whose elongated finger had leftover sparks bounding across its smoking tip. "Wrong! If only Dr. Alphys could help you solve my childish quiz questions, hmm?"

Coughing the smoke from my lungs, I rose to deny any sense of satisfaction the scrap heap was reaping. "Only a little kid would think posing that shit for a game show question was fair."

If he could, I imagined Mettaton would be grinning. "I know everything there is to know about posing, dear contestant, I can assure you that much. So don't 'count' on your victory just yet..." The robot seemed content without lightening the quiz's sudden difficulty, and the next question, although much simpler, was accompanied by an obnoxiously convoluted visual. "How many flies are in this jar?"

A. 54

B. 53

C. 55

D. 52

"Great, more god damn numbers," I lamented, silently cursing the day someone decided we needed to apply rules and logic to the universe, wracked their brain for years, and finally presented their ingenious idea of counting to the dimwitted masses. Trying to make sense of the tornado of insects circling their little glass dome would be impossible given a day, let alone a quarter of a minute. Each time I began to count about a dozen in my head one would fly behind the other, and all the progress I'd made would be swept away in the swarm. Letting out a frustrated growl, I tossed around the idea of throwing my other, now slightly melted, shoe as the time crept towards zero.

Maybe it was luck, maybe the good doctor had done something different with her strategy, but as I angrily surveyed the room in search of better targets, my gaze fell on Alphys hunched in her corner. She met mine with eyes bulging out of her head and gestured wildly downward with her chin, wordlessly begging for me to do...something. What does she expect me to be looking at? There's nothing lying on the stage, and her hands are totally empty...her hands...

I wanted to kick myself with my non-shoeless foot. After staring at them for a third time, I finally realized Alphys's sweaty palms and meaty fingers were curled together in the form of an "A." She's been giving me the answers this whole damn time, and right under the nose of that dysfunctional vending machine, too. Assuming she's got them all right, and she better have...

Out of time and out of options, I decided to test the waters. "A."

Mettaton, soaking up the tension it created, let my answer hang in the air as long as possible. My heart was hammering, whether it was from the static already occupying it or the fear of being electrocuted again. "...Correct!" he cried at last. "You're so lucky today!"

Releasing a breath of relief, I looked back at Alphys, who addressed me with an overenthusiastic thumbs-up. "Luck's the last thing I'll be needing to get out of here, Metta-ounce."

"Oh? Well how about memory, then?" An image appeared on the big screen. "Can you tell me what monster this is?" The pure white face of those deformed frog monsters I had encountered an eternity ago in the Ruins flashed on screen, followed by my choices:

A. Whimsum

B. Froggit

C. Undyne

D. Mettaton

I had just begun to utter "froggit," when a rogue Alphys sighting caused me to stutter. Her fingers were jammed together in a crude "D" shape, signifying either the correct answer, or her crippling need for an updated glasses prescription. While the latter possibility was all the more likely, I didn't have enough time to doubt the visually impaired iguana. "...I guess if I were to take a couple knives the eyes, it would kinda look a tiny bit like Mettaton...D."

Ding! "Another spot-on answer!" The image zoomed out until a Mettaton draped in a T-shirt with the proud face of a froggit stamped across the front was fully displayed. Meanwhile, the real Mettaton stood rabidly twirling his mic, whether for visual flair or to vent a growing frustration I couldn't tell. "And how flattering that you remembered! What gave it away? My dashing looks, my fantastic posture, my strong cheek bones, my—"

"—Yes, all of the above, just...shut up, please. Go download a few self-help books if you're so desperate for praise." I snuck the doctor my own thumbs-up, acknowledging her help while attempting to hide the small smirk crawling across my face.

Mettaton didn't miss a beat, his expressionless husk of a metal body trying its hardest to sneer down at me. "What a sound suggestion! But first..." To my relief, the ominous phrase didn't segue into a prolonged commercial break; the killer bot decided to smack me upside the head with another winner of a question. "Would you smooch a ghost?"

For a moment, even among the vigorous chaos of a laboratory turned game show studio, the atmosphere felt quiet and tranquil enough to hear a pin drop. "...You want me to kiss...huh?"

Once my brain had begrudgingly come to terms with the sequence of words that, somehow, for some ineffable reason, a computer was deliberately coded to string together and produce in the form of an inquiry, I dragged my gaze across the responses.

A. Heck Yeah

B. Heck Yeah

C. Heck Yeah

D. H—

"—Alphys? Something you need to get off your chest?" I asked, though when our eyes met, she seemed just as perturbed as I was, hunched over and eyeing the question as if trying to decipher a Sudoku puzzle. As if to further spite me, the timer which usually counted down to my zapping was increasing rapidly, denying even the option of offing myself just to avoid answering. Sighing in defeat, I muttered the least enthusiastic "heck yeah..." mankind could muster.

I barely heard Mettaton cheerfully responding, "Great Answer! Absolutely love it!" My mind was too busy wandering its course to the kindest (and conveniently, the only) ghost I had ever met in the Underground, Blooky, but I pushed the thought away as soon as it came. I didn't have time to miss the little guy, not with the wack-bot mere moments away from tossing me his next curveball. "It's starting to get a little steamy in here! Why don't we try and cool off with a simple one, hmm?" He repeated his tired little motion of darting off towards the side of the stage to unveil his newest witty method of torture. "How many letters in the name 'Mettaton?'"

Huh, guess he was seri–oh, shit...

What should've been trivial quickly became an impossible guess as more and more 'N's spilled into the sequence, until "Mettatonnnnnnnnnnnnnn..." became an infinitely snaking string that could barely fit on the game board. Unluckily for the bot with far too many 'N's to his name, my Alphys cheat-sheet didn't so much as flinch at the seemingly impossible task. "C," I said, bristling with confidence that would surely knock Mettaton on his blocky metal ass if he were to drift any closer. The familiar jingle greeted me, coupled with the doctor's infectiously gleeful expression.

"...Of course that was easy for you!" Mettaton grumbled, though even that managed to sound aggressively cheerful and premeditated. I felt whatever level of patience Alphys programmed him with beginning to wear thin, and dared to hope I was nearing the end of his bottomless question pool. Unless Mettaton's goal was to prolong the show for as long as his audience of one would tolerate it, a possibility which left me sick to my stomach.

"What's the matter bolt face, you running low on battery or something? Or did doc not program you with enough storage to hold any more boring riddles?"

As expected, the bot brushed off my taunting as best he could, though with more pause than before. "Ha! I'm loving the fire in your ludicrous claims, dear contestant! But, will your flames survive the thorough quenching of my trickiest question yet?" Another lame threat was thrown, another bland block of text was created for me to suffer through. "In the dating simulation video game 'Mew Mew Kissy Cutie,' what is Mew Mew's favorite food?"

I had never heard of...whatever that was, not that it mattered regardless. A few minutes ago I'd have felt threatened by the reference to some random nerd's escapist time sink, but not anymore. All I needed was to keep comfy while the answers popped up, and for Alphys to swoop in with that impeccable memory of hers and carry me out of—

"—Oh! Oh! I know this one!"

The music stopped. The confetti settled. My lips sealed together in shock. Even Mettaton feel uncharacteristically silent.

Likely on cue, a spotlight slashed through the stillness and illuminated the only thing prepared to speak. "It's snail ice cream!" Alphys said happily, excitement practically oozing from her mouth. "In the fourth chapter everyone goes to the beach and she buys ice cream for all her friends! But it's snail flavored and she's the only one who wants it! It's one of my favorite parts of the game because it's actually a very powerful message about...friendship, and..."

Whether it was my heart-devouring glare or Mettaton's hulking disappointment that drained the color from Alphys's face was up for debate, though I preferred to think it was the former. As much as I wanted to verbally tear the loud-mouth lizard limb from limb, the robot wouldn't let me have the first word. "Alphys, Alphys, Alphys," he chided in his ever deliberate and disingenuous tone, "you aren't helping our contestant, are you? How upsetting..."

Alphys remained frozen to the spot, the only motion she could muster a useless head shake while her guilt-ridden grin scared off any chance of us lying our way to safety. My fists were clenched as I cheerfully awaited being fried a to a crisp, still contemplating whether or not chucking the other sneaker would accomplish anything. Fortunately, Mettaton's knack for kidnapping the current situation and giving it a surprise makeover finally acted in my favor. "...that you didn't tell me sooner!" As soon as the words left his voice box the whole room took a sigh of relief, breathing the obnoxious music and special effects back into the air. "I'll ask a question you'll be sure to know the answer to!"

On his command, a new question burned onto the scoreboard. As I read it, I felt my anger towards Alphys fizzle out, recharge and be redirected towards the far more deserving candidate calling the shots. "Just who does Dr. Alphys have a crush on? The audience is dying to know!"

A. Undyne

B. Asgore

C. The human

D. Don't know

"You would just sell out your creator like that?" I asked, feeling almost sympathetic for the poor doctor. "Jeez, fame really does bring out the worst in people—and killer robots—huh, Metta-weighs-a-ton?"

"And just imagine!" Mettaton flipped an imaginary curl of hair, turning cheekily away from me. "If this is my worst, how could the world hope to handle my best? I'd get to answering the question you two, or the human's in for one delectable crisping!"

"Right...the human." I wasn't super thrilled over my inclusion in Alphys's list of love interests, though I held enough hope the lizard wouldn't fall for some asshole she tracked on camera for a few days at the most. She certainly didn't seem inclined to lend me a hand in guessing correct, eyes bulging out of their sockets and arms waving back in forth in front of her as if trying to chase off the nightmare she stumbled into. "Sorry Alph, gotta get myself outta here somehow," I muttered, mulling over my remaining choices with a bitter taste in my mouth. Option D is sure to get me zapped. Crushing on the king doesn't seem too farfetched; everyone around here talks about him like he's the second coming. And Undyne...

As much as I struggled against it, my mind couldn't help but wonder back to that uncomfortable photo Alphys kept on her computer. The warrior fish in a revealing swimsuit, the doctor's panicked reaction...to her dismay, the evidence all stacked up too neatly to ignore. "It's Undyne. It has to be."

My relief, Alphys's horror. The familiar jingle brought about both while Mettaton soaked in the pleasure of hearing himself speak. "See, Alphys? I told you it was obvious. Even the human figured it out." With every static, distorted syllable that hissed out of the robot's speakers, I watched as Alphys buried her face deeper and deeper into the sleeves of her lab coat. Her body convulsing yet somehow motionless, she took no action to rid herself of the bot's ridicule. "Yes, she scrawls her name in the margins of her notes."

She had never seemed smaller up on that wide empty stage. "She names programming variables after her." I screamed silently for her to move or give Mettaton a taste of his own medicine, feeling the color burning onto my cheeks. "She even writes stories of them together...sharing a domestic life." A sick tasting bile rose in my throat. "Probability of crush: one-hundred and one percent. Margin of error: one percent."

"Shut it!" I nearly threw myself against the electric cage, my reasoning getting swept up in a surge of anger. "I can't take another second of this! Your voice sounds like a blender being put through another blender! Just an infinite loop of blender-on-blender annihilation!" Pacing back and forth in the small space I was given, I hurled insults faster than I could think them up. "Who the hell do you think you are, selling other people's personal shit for some worthless TV ratings? I swear entitled shits like you only exist to piss assholes like me off! Maybe Alphys should change your name to something more fitting, like Papyrus 2.0!"

"My word! Ladies and gentlemen, we have officially let the cat out of the bag! Me-ow!" Mettaton, unphased, paused his vapid speech to tap some random buttons on his front. "Well well well, lucky you, human. It appears most of my audience missed your little...episode. With Dr. Alphys helping you, the show has completely lost its dramatic tension. We can't carry on like this! My ratings will sag lower than my own contestant's self-esteem!"

"Hey!"

"But—but! This was merely the pilot episode! Come next time, they'll be more drama! More romance! More bloodshed! Until next time, darlings!" With those as his parting words, Mettaton crafted his exit in the most sensible way possible: curling his skinny appendages into his massive body and unveiling a rocket at his back. Smoke filled the room as he blasted upward and straight through the ceiling, an exit equally extravagant as his entrance.

When the smoke cleared and the ensuing coughing fit subsided, I dared a look around the now disheveled laboratory. The four rods ensnaring me collapsed to the ground in a loud crash, granting me some much needed freedom. Mettaton may have left and the lighting returned to normal, but that said little of the mountains of confetti carpeting the floor, the giant stage in the middle of the room, and the now twin gigantic holes in the ceiling and wall. The comparatively quiet hums of Alphys's machinery were no longer drowned out by the insanity of the quiz show, an alleviation so nice it almost made me forget how much I wanted to rip the robot's circuits out with my bare hands. Almost.

The shuffling of Alphys climbing off the stage caught my attention. "Well, that was certainly...something," the doctor said with as much cheer as she could manufacture.

"Yeah. Sorry about that." Regardless of how little choice I had in the matter, guilt over dumping the contents of Alphys's heart out for the whole Underground (or however many people actually tuned in to watch the tin-head) to see was unavoidable. I found it near impossible to stay angry at the doctor after the whole ordeal that had unfolded.

"O-oh, no, no need to apologize. Mettaton t-tends to take the 'bloodshed' part of his shows a little too seriously, hah hah!" Quieter, she muttered, "Th-that last question...he wasn't supposed to ask that one..."

I finished digging my stray shoe out of a confetti pile. "No kidding. I'd look like the product of Undyne's cooking right about now if not for you handing me all the answers." Alphys stiffened at the mention of the knight's name, taking a sudden interest in the floor panels rather than our conversation. "Don't worry about, I honestly couldn't care less if you paid me to. Besides, Undyne and I are cool now. I think."

She managed a nervous smile. "Th-thank you. Hey, d-do you still want h-help navigating Hotland? I think it's the l-least I can do after that catastrophe, heh."

Even after that long-ass quiz, that is the question of the hour, isn't it? As much as I despised having the doctor's beady little eyes following me any further with her cameras, the extra help could end up going a long way. "If it means you help me take that bucket o' bolts down a few pegs, then I'm in. One condition though, no more cameras. Shit freaks me out."

"O-of course! Could I-I at least get your phone number? So I c-can call you if...you know." I nodded, pulling out the brick of a cell phone Toriel had given me all that time ago in the Ruins. What I hadn't expected was the look of absolute terror that fell over the good doctor's face. "Wh...where'd you get that thing? It's ancient! It doesn't even have texting."

The amount of recoil I experienced from her outburst was comparable to that of a .308-gauge rifle. "Well excuse me if—"

"Hold on just a sec, please!" The doctor snatched the thing right out of my hands and charged off as fast as her stubby legs could carry her. She disappeared behind a corner and, after a few seconds of screwing noises invaded my eardrums, ran back over just as fast with a newly brightened expression on her face. "Here, I upgraded it for you! It can do texting, items, it's got a key chain...I even signed you up for the Underground's number one social network!"

I took the completely slim, modern, grossly unfamiliar new model from her hands with a feeling somewhat akin to betrayal. "...Oh."

"We're officially friends now! Heh heh...heh..." She seemed to notice my estranged stare as I looked over the device, growing increasingly uncomfortable with my distant attitude. "I'm going to the bathroom. C-call me as soon as you'd like." Just like that, she vanished quickly as before, this time behind a large metallic door that fell closed with a thud.

I spent the greater part of the next three minutes scrolling hopelessly through the now far too expansive options on my "upgraded" phone, getting lost in its menus until I got fed up enough with the damn thing to force myself to quit. "Whatever, nothing to be done about it. Sorry, Tori..."

The situation wasn't all terrible, at the very least. I had a new semi-competent ally to lend a hand in getting out of the latest hellhole I'd wandered into, not to mention easier access to my older ones, and a new douchebag blood-hungry celebrity I could look forward to kicking the crap out of when the time came. Leaving Alphys's laboratory, I found myself in better spirits than I had entered with. It wasn't too often I had the chance to say that; I took it as a good omen as I stepped out into the warm grasp of Hotland's sweltering heat.