Core Issues: Season Five
By Nicolle

Interlude: Princetale

The dream was so vivid Frisk felt like she was standing in the midst of it.

Another Frisk worked diligently in a laboratory of white tile and shining metal. Dark hair pulled back, warm, brown eyes a bit tired, skin a bit pale: a woman juggling too many responsibilities at once and the strain was wearing her thin. A woman who was also as bright as she was swift: a shooting star.

She was completing work on a set of vials, variables for the control set finished earlier; medical research. A red hologram of a teen boy appeared on her shoulder and she gave it a bright smile.

"Hey, C! Mission time?"

When the hologram didn't respond, she frowned. "C? Is everything okay?"

A man in a green hoodie and a teen sporting a set of brass goggles on his head were both suddenly in the door to the lab, looking in on her. She looked over at them, blinking a little. A ghostly child floated up and around the men in the door, coming over as another hologram, this one female and glowing blue appeared next to the red one. A boy with pale white hair in a green striped shirt ran out of a near doorway, reaching out to quickly take her hand.

She stared at them all, eyebrows knit together in worry. "What's going on?"

And then she gasped, doubling over, dropping the clipboard to hold her head, eyes squeezed shut as she screamed. The world vibrated around the sound, the glass vials shattering.

Frisk jolted awake, gasping for air. Taking a deep breath, she let out a long and shuddering sigh. Laying back down, she reached over, carefully pulling her infant son into the crook of her arm. She turned slightly on her side, reaching out for Chara, and whimpered when her hand only touched the wall.

The lock on the door clicked and the door opened. A child Frisk, barely ten years old, came in the room as quickly and as quietly as she could, her long nightgown swishing around her ankles. She crawled in next to her older double, clutching at her.

Frisk pet the child's head, trying, with gentle petting, to sooth away the girl's terror. "You had the dream again too, huh?"

The girl nodded, sniffing as she pushed her face into Frisk's side. "Why?"

She'd had the same dream every night since she'd been kidnapped and brought here. Both of them had.

"I think it's something to do with the void. I think she's connected to it."

The girl sniffed. "And Sans wants the void travel stopped?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

The plaintive word hung in the air. But Frisk didn't have an answer.

Frisk gently nudged the girl. "Go on back to your room before Sans finds you."

She shook her head vehemently. "No! I want to stay with you!" She sniffed, tears on her cheeks. "I don't have anyone else! Toriel is gone! So is Asgore! I haven't seen Papyrus or Alphys or anyone for weeks!"

The door swung open and Frisk quickly sat up, scooping Benjamin and Frisk close. Sans stood there, hands in the pockets of his hoodie, one eye glowing an ominous yellow. Frisk swallowed, hard. This skeleton wasn't anything like the Judge who watched over her family so protectively at home. This man was broken and didn't see a problem breaking others. He'd demonstrated that thoroughly before locking her away and promising a similar fate for baby Benjamin if she didn't do as told.

And he didn't like it when she and the child Frisk spent even a moment together. As if contact between them had a deeper significance.

"*head on back to your room, kiddo."

A sudden determination filled the girl and she stood, resolute. "No! I'm staying with Mom!"

Frisk immediately putting an arm around her daughter.

Sans blinked, and the glow in his eye stopped dead. He sighed deeply, some part of him defeated. "*so be it." He looked to Frisk. "*it's time."

Frisk breathed a sigh of relief and put on a baby sling. After settling baby Benjamin into the soft fabric of the sling, she followed Sans into the next room, the one with a massive computer interface. It'd taken a week of trial and error to set it up properly. It just wasn't the kind of interface she used for dimensional folding. And then weeks of experimenting until she'd figured out how to do what he wanted: shut down all travel through the void. A concept that she had to very quickly comprehend. She hadn't known that her world and her life was one variation of thousands, that other versions of her and her husband existed across time and space. And that their lives, more than anything else, were the most significant. That their story was THE story.

At first, she tried folding pieces of the void itself, trying to understand what she was dealing with. The process was easy enough but folding all the void around a timeline was cumbersome at best. And Sans was concerned that it left too many 'holes' that allowed escape.

The first time she attempted to fold a timeline itself, she desperately wished she hadn't. It was a simple, but perfect solution. No one on the timeline could move out of the fold. And from the outside, it didn't look any different.

At least, it didn't look different to her and Sans didn't indicate that it looked different to him.

The next several months were spent coding to fold all existing timelines, working around Benjamin's needs, if not her own. He was going to reach his first birthday soon. Chara had missed his son's first words and first steps. She hoped Chara and the kids were okay.

The program was finally ready. A few keystrokes and no one goes anywhere.

Well, not everyone.

There was a slight off in the fold for the timeline she was on. A way to slip in and out if you knew what you were looking at. And even with thousands of timelines to look through, she recognized hers. While the code reflected that a fold would be present, she didn't fold her home timeline. She'd left a fold near the house. One Chara would see. She just hoped that she'd left enough information in it for Chara to figure out how to undo this insanity and find her.

Frisk tapped a random button on the keyboard, activating the screens and bringing the computer out of sleep mode. She loaded the program, and under Sans' watchful eye, she knew she couldn't stall. This was it.

Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Behind her eyes she could see the other Frisk; the shooting star.

"*well?"

Frisk pushed the chair back and stood. "You're the one who wants this. All you have to do is hit enter."

Sans eyed her for a moment, looking for some deception, before reaching over the keyboard. The child hugged Frisk around and waist, trembling even as she was unable to look away. Sans hit enter.

A scream filled the air, every molecule in the universe vibrating with it. Frisk fell to her knees, clutching the baby and the girl to her, shaking against the onslaught, covering their ears as best she could and knowing that it wouldn't help. Sans fell over, boney hands covering his ear holes. Baby Benjamin shrieked in time with the agonized wail.

After what seemed like an eternity, the scream died away, and Frisk shuddered deeply.

Sans used the desk to pull himself to his feet. Breathing heavily, his eyes zeroed in on Frisk. "*WHAT WAS THAT?!"

The girl began to laugh, a soft giggle at first. And as the sound grew, her voice changed to the all out cackle of a much older boy. Glowing, blood red eyes looked up at Sans. "You idiot! You just hurt someone very special to a lot of people. And now they're all going to come for you!"