Hey again! the next chapter was going to be a massive time jump (bigger than any so far) and I realised there was a few chunks of story and lore that needed to be filled in for the chapter to make sense to anyone else but me. Sorry for the exposition, I tried to make it as natural as possible.

I am well ahead on story now but i refuse to upload from the app anymore XD

Gaster compares the readings to the control sample readings again now he's alone, then pulls out the charts from the yellow soul that Asgore had 'found' and loaned them. If he knew Asgore, he was hoping Gaster would come up with a solution for the barrier problem without having to take another child's life.

Something else to add to his slowly growing work pile.

He runs a hand down his face, and sighs. Maybe he should get more staff in. A few interns, maybe? He makes a note in the margin of his notepad to start looking to the upper levels of the schools and put out some signs to see if he could attract anyone with potential. He also looks at his cellphone, which hasn't rung or chirped at all tonight thank goodness. But that was also a bad thing, because it means that someone was having a bad day, and he'd been so work focused it had slipped his attention until now. Gaster would be the first to admit that he didn't translate or read emotions well in others - it wasn't that he was clueless it was just that sometimes he was so busy looking to the answers that he completely skimmed over the question, to put it metaphorically. They had all been doing better, much better, and especially his eldest son, but one of the things he'd learned over time was that nothing had to go wrong for there to be a shift in mood. He supposed that was the nature of whatever was causing this within his son, and he had hoped that the new scanner would illuminate… something about the issue.

So far, this was not the case. He did, however, find something else interesting, which was how he'd found himself triple checking the results in front of him until he'd distracted himself with his musings. He refocused himself, making himself a promise to try and remember to try the line again later. If there was still nothing, he'd text dan- Monster Guy. Damn it, Sans, that name was pretty catchy.
"DAD?" The door to his room swings open. He looks up from his papers at Papyrus.
"Would you like me to come and do it?" He preempts the question and answers it with his own. Papyrus gives a grumpy mumble, but Gaster doesn't catch exactly what was said. He can guess though. "If they're that bad, I won't try to do the voices."

Papyrus considers this, and visibly brightens. "NYEH HEH HEH! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, FIND THIS ACCEPTABLE. BUT IF HE CALLS, YOU ARE TO WAKE ME UP."

Gaster allows himself a quiet chuckle in the wake of the door slamming closed, and he pockets his phone as he leaves to go read to Papyrus. Better than him being in a mood all day tomorrow.
Worry niggles him again. It was a very rare event that bedtime was missed ever since he'd had the idea of putting a lined phone in Sans' room. It was an even rarer event the they got no call at all, and on those days he usually still answered. He reads 'fluffy bunny's to Papyrus, who is satisfied enough that he settles in to sleep. He's just getting his phone out to call a second time, when it rings.

"hey dad." Sans sounds… exhausted. But happy, which floods Gaster with relief.
"Good evening."
"IS THAT SANS?" the call comes from the other bedroom.
"hey, tell him it's santa."
"Do not involve me in winding your brother up." But Gaster is grinning on his end of the phone even as his door is all but kicked off its hinges as it bursts open.. He hands off the phone to Papyrus immediately.

"YOU'RE LATE, BROTHER! WERE YOU SLEEPING? I BET YOU WERE SLEEPING."
"hehe, yep. you caught me." even as he says it, he idly wipes the remnants of dirt and oil off of his hands on his shorts.
"LAZYBONES. YOU MISSED THE BEDTIME STORY."
"sorry, pap. did dad try and do the voices again?"
"NOT THIS TIME."
"so you wanna hear it told properly?"
"I THOUGHT YOU WOULD NEVER ASK! NYEH HEH HEH HEH HEH!"

Sans lifts his left hand and his copy of fluffy bunny floats into his lap, and the telltale echo of hands free comes through. He hears Papyrus settle himself into his covers, then Sans begins to read.

Gaster goes through when he hears them exchange 'goodnight's and says his own to Papyrus as he takes his phone with a smile.
"you know he just does it so he can hear the story twice." Sans chuckles quietly as Gaster hits the speaker button again to switch back to the ear piece.
"I don't doubt it. I don't tell stories that badly."
"i dunno, you're too shelf-conscious to get the voices right."
Gaster feels a laugh slip out. "I prefer books about black holes. They really suck me in."
Sans laughs hard on his end of the phone. "eh, I found the grammar hard in them until I read the comma sutra. those books made me feel dense before that."
Gaster shakes his head as he laughs harder. Once they've run their course on laughter, Gaster decides to disengage before this gets out of hand. "So is everything okay?"
"yep, is now. jenny crapped out but i fixed 'er. i lost track of time while i was working."
"I don't think I will ever understand your attachment to that machine."
"just showing her the love she deserves before she becomes obsolete." Gaster can hear the grin down the phone.
"Right." He has no idea what else to say to that. "So what was the issue?"
"probably the fact she hasn't had new parts since the dinosaurs roamed. i'd make a joke, but it's not kind to poke fun at the elderly."
That makes Gaster chuckle again. "Since when has that stopped you?"
"since I actually like this old lady." His voice is just full of the smug grin that gaster knows is on his face right now. "oh, shoot, i gotta go. didn't notice i was this late. i'm gonna go finish my date with a pensioner. see you tomorrow."
The line goes dead in his ear, then picks up the dial tone. Gaster has nothing to except shake his head with an amused smile.

He turns back to his desk to finish his own 'date'.

Gaster takes a minute to just stare at what he was being shown. There was a rolled up piece of paper that looked suspiciously like the blueprint sheet propped against the wall, and 'jenny' was half the size that she was and was purring like a kitten.
"So… by 'fix', he meant 'rebuilt from the ground up'?" He asks, dumbfounded.
"Yeah. He came by when we asked him to call you to either come fix it or arrange maintenance, managed to get it working, then came back again later with a heap of parts. He only left off and went to bed about an hour ago or so."
"Damn."
"Haha, yeah." The guy laughs at the reaction. "So, should we send someone to-"
"Let him sleep. I'll speak to him later."
"Whatever you say, boss."

Nearly the whole lab is buzzing through the day, talk of the new generator already circulated and most of them having seen it. Seems it's not just Gaster he's impressed. Gaster gives him a full eight hours before he goes to rouse him, but he finds an empty room. He checks the most obvious places, and finds him back in the generator room already. Nobody had seen him walk through, but that didn't surprise Gaster in the slightest. He already had smudges covering him, and had set up a mini-backup generator so he could work with power still being provided.
"'sup dad?" The voice comes from inside the machine, not looking out from what he was doing.
"It was working fine, how come you're back at it again?"
"eh, just some fine tuning. i used some of the core's thermal energy conversion principles and scaled them down. it's not gonna be enough to power the underground, but should keep the lab going until you've got something better. and because the amount of energy needed is not so large, the cooling system was way less of a bitch to figure out." Gaster takes a minute to compute while Sans carries on, only pausing to beckon tools to him as he works. "it worked fine, but it hit me a couple hours ago that if I can re-route the cooling system to go all the way through instead of just at the current conversion point, efficiency could be increased by feeding the energy through a second thermal siphon to concentrate the magical energy. she's got the empty space begging to be used and use it i shall."

Not a pun in sight, but his voice sounds full of life. He'd sounded the same last night, too. Now, Gaster knew that Sans enjoyed the sciences almost as much as he did himself, but he'd yet to get him to do more than study. But if he was taken with it like this…

"you haven't said anything in about four minutes. are you annoyed I took the core plans? they're in the corner if you want them ba-"
"Can you come out?"
"give me… about… twelve and a half minutes... give or take five in either direction and i'll be done."
"I'll wait."

Oh crap. Maybe he should have asked first. Between being distracted by what he was working on and being inside of the machine, he wasn't able to get a good read on how deep the grave he just dug himself was. He works as fast as he can while being as careful as possible, and he's finally done. well, jenny, it was good while i knew you. send flowers to pap and make sure you are in the list of things to spread me on. you were my first love. He chuckles to himself, before carefully removing himself and the tools from the machine.

"Does it work?"
"uhh… should do?" He sounds unsure of himself. Gaster motions to him, and he reroutes power back through Jenny, looking both nervous and hopeful. Sure enough, she hums to life quietly as the mini generator clicks off. He quietly celebrates to himself with a small fist pump. "yes!"
"This is good work. Really, really good work."
"this was… i mean, the groundwork was already there, i just scaled the numbers a little bit and so i don't know if you should call it my work-"
"I haven't got those numbers to work yet, Sans. This might be a smaller scale, but it's not my work - it's all you." Gaster grins at him as he stares down at the floor with a deep flush on his cheeks, but the smile in his eye lights translates the fact that his soul is all but soaring with the praise. "So you think the CORE's issue is the cooling system?"
"well... yeah. it's lava." He pupils lift back to Gaster with just a touch of 'well, duh'. "the numbers are sound otherwise this wouldn't have worked, the design itself seems… fine, if a little old fashioned, but that's a whole lotta lava you're trying to cool at once. the problem is that the heat is overloading the system - this is just taking the heat that the lava produces, not the lava itself after all. you could dump all the snow in snowdin into the system but unless the system itself is efficient enough it has a snowball's chance in hell of not overheating. pun definitely intended."

Gaster just raises a brow bone at him. The confidence runs out of him.

"uhh… how boned am i right now?"
"Actually, quite the opposite. Although we may need to talk about how you got into my office without my knowledge. Keep getting into it, by the sounds of things."
"...what?"
Gaster just beams at him. "Come with me, we have a discussion to have it seems."

He places the badge on the table, one that denotes the staff of the laboratory. Sans just looks at it, completely dumbfounded. "I was going to wait another couple of years, but it seems like you're more than ready if this is what you want to do."
The pupils lift from the badge to him, and he can feel Sans reading him. Not his numbers, but everything else about him. "if i don't want to?"
"Entirely your choice."
"what if i wanted to run away to waterfall and join the circus?"
"There's no circus in the underground."
"i could become a clown and start one. the sansational skelepun's travelling show." He gestures with an arm to emphasize the title.
"The underground's a small place. Would you make enough money to live?"
"...good point." Sans picks up the badge with a grin. Gaster feels like there's something behind it, but he cannot get any sense of what it is so he decides to leave it. "it's a good thing i'm sanstastic at other things too then. see ya at work monday, then... boss."

Sans slips into the working teams like he'd never not been there. After the generator, not one person questioned whether the young skeleton belonged among them, and the doubtful ones (the oldest members, mainly, due to the fact he was the youngest staff member there) were quickly proved wrong. Sans laughed and joked with the workers, but still kept an emotional distance from them as much as possible. His dad's answers to his question had stuck with him and were bothering him something chronic, and he lapsed back into old habits of masking his no good feelings and thought with endless humour now that he was outside of his inner circle of 3. The trouble for everyone else was, not that they knew it, that he was better at it with age.

And also the fact that he was past the point of being young enough to go cry in the bathroom, which definitely helped to not tip people of his slowly sliding mood.

He'd made his peace with this life long ago. Didn't mean he liked it, but he accepted it. Besides, he enjoyed science and the challenge of helping with the CORE and dropping studying gave him time to look at things that interested him more. The work shift gave him more free time than endlessly studying, which meant he could delve into his personal interests further. 'Santa' had managed to steal a cellphone and wipe it, then essentially build a new one out of the parts with that spare time, and Santa had given it to Sans to give to Pap on Gyftmas for some reason he pulled out of his pelvis at the time. Hell knows what he said, Sans didn't actually remember, but Pap had been so ecstatic with the gift he didn't really question it further. Gaster dared not say a word about Santa, or the gift even though he had his suspicions. He didn't know why Sans was insistent on indulging the fantasy of the mythical Gyftmas man, but it wasn't something that he wanted to argue with Sans over. Again. The last one had ended with him 'accidentally' locked in his office over Gyftmas while the boys celebrated outside and engaged with him by signing through the door. Papyrus had been distraught all up until the gifts came out, then he's got so excited about the things he'd received that Sans had been able to distract his brother very easily for three whole days - the amount of time that it had taken for Gaster to very unwillingly write a 'thank you' note to 'santa' for Sans to 'send' with Papyrus'.

Gyftmas was off-limits to reality and Gaster didn't dare touch it again as much as his logic-based mind wanted to. It was also the first time that he found out he was really rather glad his eldest wasn't taken to arguments or revenge often, because he had a sharp edge he kept well hidden. So hidden, in fact, that Gaster had not been able to actually prove it was his fault at all, although he knew it.

In this time, progress had been made in the soul labs. Blueprints had been drawn up for a second machine, based on the first but much larger in scale, to extract seperate traits from souls. This was based on all the findings so far, but Gaster wasn't sure what could be done with the traits once extracted, all except for determination. Determination only existed in any amount in human souls, so far any monster soul showed up little to none. This was intriguing. That was as far as progress went in relation to the human souls. No, the progress was made with Sans. Gaster finally held some answers. Sans had high levels of justice and patience within his soul (Yes, Gaster thought that explained a lot in and of itself) and the readings are what actually prompted the team to take more samples of monster souls. They found variations of the levels of each trait in every sample, some higher than others... but so far Sans' were the only ones to this height. Every other trait reading showed up as little to none at all in his soul, however. The current theories in rotation was as follows:

When Gaster's magic was used to fix the child's soul, the mature magic had forced his young and unstable soul's magic to mature beyond it's limit. The already shattered nature of his soul made it 'porous' enough to absorb the fixing energy with the skeleton's magic as a catalyst, but in return it had warped it somewhat. He probably would have had to have had already somewhat high readings, though it would have been on the usual monster level of high and not low-level human readings that they were at. The soul has essentially lost all of it's traits except the two which were boosted, again without further progress with research it it unknown why. Some people think they drained away before the fixing, some people think the fixing caused it. It's a pretty neat 49/51 percentile split, actually, and Gaster falls on the side of the fixing causing it - his magic latching onto the the two highest traits and using the others to boost them to a workable level for a whole soul to remain - unless he gets proven otherwise later, of course. The instability and premature manifestation of his magic early in life and crashes are caused by the fact his soul is literally being held together by an outside catalyst (Gaster's magic). They have managed to prove -in as much as such a thing is proveable- that the emotional problems are caused by the fact that without the intervention his soul would have shattered. In fact, it seems likely that the depression is caused by the fact that his soul is constantly almost falling apart and being pulled back together, negative thoughts and feelings accelerating the process due to the facts monsters are generally made of positive emotions and energies like compassion, love and mercy. He removed his soul for a scan on one of his 'days', as Papyrus had decided to refer to them after Gaster called it an 'episode' and Papyrus had declared the word too medical and 'sciencey', and when they had got it out of his immediate vicinity the thing had dimmed and split apart to the point the thin purple and green threads holding it together internally had been visible. Gaster had returned it immediately, and it had pulled back together the moment it was back within the range for the little magic his body was made of was within range to support it. It was now a rule that on one of his 'days', Sans was not to be scanned if he did not want to sit in the machine itself (so that meant it was a rule he was never to be scanned, as he never wanted to and Gaster wasn't going to make him). It was an unspoken rule that nobody had told Sans of what had happened to his soul.
Gaster had told him he changed his mind. He hadn't even argued that day when Sans told him he wasn't putting it back in because he needed a break for an hour or two, he'd just stayed to quietly supervise and make sure that his son didn't fall apart while it wasn't within him. Sans had seen the reaction as logical, which was fair as last time he had lost three fingertips, and had allowed it even though he had also very bluntly told Gaster that wasn't everything and he knew it because it was "written on your face with marker pen, or may as well be". He'd also noted that 'Dull Sans' as he'd called himself, was more of a dick on his 'days' and told him he wasn't going to apologize for it. That was fine by Gaster, just as long as 'Dull Sans' didn't become 'a pile of dust Sans'.

He had no progress on Asgore's little side project, and little idea how to make it as yet. Gaster finds the perfect intern, at least, to balance the scales of that one. After kicking out about thirty applicants who were not the right fit (and one that smelt if the wrong kind of cigarettes whom had stopped and spoken to Sans - they'd even had a quick hug which was wildly out of character for the skeleton but Gaster couldn't figure out what had gone on there), the small yellow dinosaur came through his door like an angel from above. It wasn't a lot more staff, but one good one was more than worth thirty bad so he would definitely make the trade on that one. She was anxious, stuttered a fair bit, bit she was bright, eager and willing to learn. She didn't go out of her way to make friends or talk to anyone at all if she didn't need to, the complete opposite to Sans' technique of keep everyone at distance by beingly as friendly and charismatic as he needed to be to quietly control the room, but she's a sweet girl he's pretty sure. Her work didn't appear to suffer for the anxiety, except for the fact that when she went to hand in her work she often second guessed it and went to take it back or turned around before she even got to him. He got into the habit on checking in with her fairly often so good work would make it to him before it would be taken back.

Things are just about the usual level of chaotic, and Gaster thinks to himself that he will happily take it. The voice in his skull that tells him he's a damn jinx sounds suspiciously like his eldest son's.