[Notes :I wanted to go back to longer chapters but this got slightly longer than anticipated. Anyway, in this chapter Shameless Self-Insert returns and the Great Papyrus learns more about human biology.

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Sans was woken up by the buzzing of his phone against his hip bone. When did he even fall asleep? Oh well, it was a slow day at his improvised hot dog stand anyway, he probably didn't miss many customers, if any. Plus the work day should be over soon.

The skeleton's phone buzzed again, signalling another new text. He took it from his left pocket and found two messages from Hisha. The first was a picture of black smoke coming from the window of some human apartment complex, and the second simply read : "Our apartment…"

Well that certainly didn't look good.

"u ok?" Sans replied immediately.

"Need help", the human sent back. "appartement burnt down van we stay at tour place or a nywhere please?"

He had never seen her make so many typos before ; usually she would be the one to correct his typos or get frustrated at him for not using proper capitalisation.

"where r u" he typed, already getting up from his seat and preparing to leave the hot dog stand.

"Town next to ebott"

The bone around Sans' eye sockets shifted slightly in his equivalent of a frown. This answer was too vague for his "shortcuts" to work. It had to be a location he already knew.

"anywhere near the spider bakery?"

"Kinda"

"meet me there right now"

A minute later, he already was in the next town over. More precisely, in an alley right next to Muffet's second shop on the Surface. He left the alley to wait in front of the bakery, his hood covering most of his face. Still holding his phone in his left hand, he decided to call his brother while he waited. The first ring wasn't even finished when Papyrus picked up.

"hey", Sans said into the receiver, leaning against the wall behind him and keeping his free hand deep in his pocket. "you home right now?"

"AS A MATTER OF FACT, I AM!" Papyrus replied. "BUT NOT FOR LONG, BECAUSE I'M GOING TO THE STORE TO GET THIS WEEK'S SUPPLY!"

"good, 'cause we're gonna need some stuff. from the human section of the store."

"OH? IS FRISK VISITING? BUT ISN'T IT A WEEK DAY?" Papyrus asked, slightly confused because if there was one thing Toriel and Asgore agreed on, it was that sleepovers were for weekends and vacations only.

"nope. but hisha just texted me and it looks like her apartment burnt down so i guess she and her brother will have to stay with us tonight."

"ARE THEY ALRIGHT?"

"looks like they're not doing so hot right now", Sans commented.

"WELL I'LL GO GET EVERYTHING OUR HUMAN FRIENDS NEED RIGHT A- WAIT, WAS THAT SUPPOSED TO BE A PUN?"

"don't get heated over it."

"I'M HANGING UP NOW!"

And he did.

Sans kept waiting for the humans. Taking more than one other person with him through a "shortcut" might be a bit tricky. This wasn't something he was used to do. Just thinking about it already made him feel tired. He closed his eye sockets for a second… then opened them again as he heard Hisha's voice calling his name. She and her brother approached him and briefly greeted him.

Her brother was getting better at understanding and speaking the local language. Slowly.

"alright, follow me", the skeleton told the human siblings. "and stay close. i know a shortcut."

They followed him into the alley, then a second later the three of them were in front of the skeletons' house in Ebott. The humans looked at their surroundings with wide eyes, then turned to each other as if to ask : "did you see that too?" Finally, they turned to Sans again.

"fast shortcut, huh?" he commented.

"How." the young man simply asked.

"It's like… a one-hour bus drive between the two cities, how the fuck…" the young woman mumbled.

"don't worry 'bout it", the skeleton said as he opened the front door to his house. It wasn't locked.

Once everyone was inside, Sans went straight to the couch and let himself drop onto the cushions on the left side. A drop of sweat was rolling down his skull. Transporting two people with him at once had been a bit too much.

"just make yourselves comfortable", he told his guests, suppressing a yawn.

He took a bag of chips from his pocket and opened it. It should restore a bit of his magic. He offered some to the humans to be polite ; they both refused so he just shrugged and started eating. Hisha's brother looked around while Hisha herself opened the small shoulder bag she was carrying, peered into it and muttered some French swear words under her breath.

"my bro must still be at the store so, ya know, if you need something we can call him and-"

"Yes, do it right now", she interrupted, sitting on the right side of the couch but not daring to lean into it, staying on its edge.

Papyrus picked up his phone as soon as it started ringing. He always did. Well, except that one time his phone had been taken away from him. The call came from his brother's number, but it wasn't his voice that started speaking a bit too fast through the device :

"Hey, it's Hisha! So, hum, the fire happened at the worst time and I don't have enough emergency pads with me for the week and canyoubuysomeformepleasethankyouIneedthem?"

The skeleton stopped in the middle of Ebott Supermarket, one hand holding his phone to where his ear would be and the other still clutching his shopping cart that already had half of the usual friend's-house-just-burned-down supplies in it.

"OH, HELLO HISHA!" he replied. The other customers in the store instinctively turned their head towards the source of the noise then went back to what they were previously doing as soon as they realised it was just the usual shouting skeleton. "WHAT… EXACTLY DO YOU NEED?"

"Pads. You know. As in pads and tampons for periods?"

"WHAT PERIODS?"

The human on the other side of the phone remained silent for a solid twenty seconds.

"HISHA! ARE YOU ALRIGHT?"

"S-sorry, I just… didn't expect that question. Hey, Sans, could we just… 'take a shortcut' to the store so I can buy my shit myself?"

Papyrus could almost hear the young woman's air quotes through the phone.

"THERE IS NO NEED FOR THAT! FOR I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, WILL FIND WHAT YOU NEED RIGHT NOW!"

"…There should be a thing with 'feminine hygiene' or something written above it somewhere in the store", Hisha told him. "Do you see it?"

"NOT YET, BUT I'LL CALL YOU BACK WHEN I DO!"

Papyrus hanged up and resumed pushing his shopping cart through the aisles of the store. He had seen the one aisle the human woman had mentioned before, of course. He just didn't know what the products there were for exactly. There were still a lot of human things monsters like him didn't understand yet. Apparently these… pads and tampons? were something very important to his friend, so whatever they were, he would make sure to get her the best ones available!

He found the right aisle pretty quickly, as the store wasn't that big. However, he had no idea which ones of the many coloured packages he should pick. Should he just take them all?

The skeleton chose to call back first.

"I FOUND THE THINGS!" he exclaimed into the phone receiver.

One human standing two metres away jumped slightly at the sudden yelling, nearly dropping the plastic package in their hands, then looked up to see it was just the same skeleton they had heard earlier. They shrugged and moved on with their shopping.

"Good!" Hisha said through the phone. "'Cause Sans says he's too tired to take me to the store anyway."

"do ya have any idea how much energy it takes to transport more than one person like earlier?" the distant voice of Sans asked.

"Well, no, I don't", the human admitted.

"papyrus got ya covered anyway. and he said earlier we didn't need to come. which is great, 'cause I need to rest my bones for a minute."

"Ok, ok. Anyway…" she cleared her throat and started speaking directly to Papyrus again, "how about you just send us a picture so I can see if my brand is there? Then I'll text you which packages to pick?"

The tall skeleton agreed, hanged up, took a picture of the aisle and sent it to his brother's phone. Thanks to the picture, Hisha could point out exactly which ones of the coloured packages she needed.

With this matter dealt with, Papyrus pushed his shopping cart farther into the store.

Hisha stared at the screen of Sans' phone for a few seconds before calling her brother, who sat on the couch between his sister and their host. The human siblings started talking in French, the sister pointing at the phone screen.

The only word Sans could decipher was… "police"?[1]

"can i have my phone back now?" he asked.

"Sorry, that was very rude of me, I just-" Hisha apologised as she got up and gave the skeleton his phone back, "I wanted to make sure I didn't imagine things. And turns out I wasn't. I still don't know how you changed the font on your phone but the text I just sent was in the default font so I guess I accidentally changed it back or…"

"i never changed the font", Sans stated, storing his half-eaten bag of chips into his pocket. "stuff i write just comes out that way. my bro has a similar thing going on too."

He created a new note on his phone, typed "see? it's just my type ;)" and showed the screen to the two confused humans. Hisha's brother even asked if he could try typing something too ; once the permission was granted he added some random letters to the note and of course said letters weren't in Sans' font.

"What font…?" the young human man asked.

"Is that comic s…" his sister trailed off. "Oh. OH…"

She sat back on the couch and stared at the ceiling for a while.

Papyrus soon arrived home with all the supplies needed, which got him a chorus of thank-yous from his human guests. Then Hisha grabbed the pads (whatever those were for) and ran to the bathroom. When she returned a few minutes later, the tall skeleton had already started cooking dinner with the help of the other human. Sans was still on the couch.

"Hey, thanks again for the pads", Hisha said as she stepped into the kitchen. "You saved my life. And your furniture."

"REALLY?"

"Well, the life-saving part might be a tiny bit exaggerated."

"WHAT DO THESE THINGS DO ANYWAY?" Papyrus asked, chopping an onion in half.

"It's for periods", the human in black explained. "We use pads and tampons to soak up period blood so it doesn't get everywhere and-"

The tall skeleton dropped his knife on the kitchen counter and went to the young woman's side ; her brother picked up the knife and finished chopping the onion himself.

"BLOOD?" Papyrus repeated. "ISN'T THAT SUPPOSED TO STAY INSIDE OF YOU? ARE YOU ALRIGHT, FRIEND?"

Both humans chuckled.

"I'm alright!" Hisha reassured her host. "Yes, usually it stays inside but during periods you… hum… how do I words? Basically, when you have a working uterus it sorta… shed its inner lining every month. It lasts a few days and it causes bleeding. Yeah. I'm used to it."

"OH. I DIDN'T KNOW HUMANS COULD SHED! THE HUMAN BODY IS FULL OF SURPRISES!"

Papyrus, reassured, went back to his kitchen counter only to find all the onions and tomatoes had already been chopped to pieces by his other guest.

"'read somewhere that about half of all humans go through that after puberty", Sans added.

Since when was he standing in the kitchen entrance?

"the book made it sound bloody uncomfortable", he continued.

Hisha snorted while the other two fiercely ignored him.

[1]In French we refer to text fonts as "polices d'écriture" or just "polices". Don't ask. I don't know either. ^^"