The next several weeks passed in a hazy blur for Frisk – at least, she thought they were weeks. She really had no concept of the passage of time in her dark little room. Every day – or what she assumed to be days – Muffet would come visit her. The spider-woman would give her some food – always water and a warm soup with some sort of fungus chopped up into it – with a cup of the same blue medicine, empty her bedpan, inspect Frisk's wounds, and then replace the bloody bandages and dressing wrapped around the human's abdomen.
Muffet would talk soothingly, trying to distract the younger girl from both the pain and the wound itself. She would talk about the latest gossip from around the Underground – Mettaton's new band, the bi-annual Snowdin sledding race (won, of course, by the local Dog Regiment of the Royal Guard), the newest fashion trends in the capital; occasionally, she would ask Frisk questions about herself, about humans and the Surface. So, Frisk would answer to the best of her ability. She was eight years old, a fact which greatly amused Muffet for some inexplicable reason; she came from a village in the mountains of Catai known for growing marigolds and potatoes.
"Catai?" Muffet asked, blinking all of her eyes at once as she gently removed Frisk's dressing one day. She covered her mouth with a hand, giggling at Frisk's expression. "Everything we know about the Surface is from, well, at least a thousand years ago dearie. Sure, we get bits of human artifacts that wash down in the water, but other than that we don't know what it's like up there anymore."
"Catai. It's a country." Frisk explained, remembering her third grade geography lessons. That seemed like such a long, long time ago. "A big human kingdom."
"A human kingdom? There's more than one?"
Frisk nodded. "Aquillia, Ardashira, Catai, Khurasan, Nabhivarsha, Sikaiana, and Utawala." She recited the list, stumbling over the longer, more complex names. The girl remembered simpler times, when she was sitting in class looking up at the big map of Laudivasia, the World-Island.
"There are so many..." Muffet mused. "How did the humans ever defeat Asgore in the first place?"
"Back then," Frisk said, staring off, channeling the old tales and history books. "humans were more scared of monsters than of each other, so they put their differences aside for a while."
"But then they started fighting each other again after the monsters were gone."
The girl nodded again. "Humans like to fight. We once had a war that lasted for almost a hundred years straight. The Long War. The only reason it ended was because the countries started running out of people to fight for them."
"Yes, humans like to fight…but you don't, do you dearie? "
Muffet seemed to realize after a time that humans enjoyed light as well, and so she began to leave a number of candles burning in Frisk's room, which improved the human girl's mood exponentially. Her bedroom was spacious and rectangular, her bed nestled in the top left corner. Directly across from her was a vanity table; a candle sat on a nightstand beside her, casting dim light on her face, which she could see in the table's mirror. Her face was pale, her eyes hollow, and her hair a raggedy mess. In the middle of the long wall on her bed's side of the room was a large oriel window with a cushy seat nestled under it. Opposite of the window was a heavy wooden door where Muffet always emerged from. A few feet to the right of the vanity table was another wooden door that she assumed led into a closet.
So, Frisk simply waited, spending her days staring up at the ceiling or out the eternally dark window, trying to ignore the pain that, though dulled by medicine, was always there. It was still exceptional most of the time, hurting her to even move. Beneath this, though, there was another pain. A greater pain that she could feel inside of her, practically in her very soul. It was sadness and anger; hopelessness and hatred. Such complex emotions for a girl her age to feel. Frisk had tried so hard, gotten so far; she hadn't harmed a hair on a single monster's head since she had arrived in the Underground – that was a lesson her mother had always made sure she understood: without kindness and understanding, there was nothing. Both of her mothers had learned it growing up in the second generation following the Long War, when it looked like the world might once again dissolve into bloody, brutal conflict. Even if Frisk tried to be kind though, the world just beat her down. This depression settled over her like a dark cloud as she realized for the first time just how grim her situation was. Not only was she, a completely defenseless eight-year old girl, trapped deep underground in the middle of a kingdom chock-full of the deadly monsters of legend, but she was also grievously injured and being actively hunted by the highly dangerous King of All Monsters, with only Muffet and however many spiders were under her command standing between her and certain death.
After a while, Muffet started coming less often, delegating her nursing tasks to squads of her tiny spider minions. The first time the Nursing Squad appeared, dozens of them bursting out from under the door and window, Frisk had been terrified, afraid that maybe they were going to eat her alive or lay eggs in her wound, or something equally disturbing. Instead, a dozen of the little guys worked together to carry food to her and even replace her bandages, although it took much longer than it would've taken somebody with actual hands. Eventually, Frisk tried talking to them and found that she could indeed communicate with the spiders. They didn't always have much to say though, and quite a few of them were…unique, to say the least. A member of the Bedpan Squad, Zowie, seemed to have an endless supply of 'fun' facts about stool (and other forms of excrement) to spout off to her; the Medicine Squad leader, Jep, made many unsettling remarks about how Frisk was "pretty like a corpse". The leader of the Bandage Squad, a fellow named Abner, constantly chattered to her about happenings around the Realm of Spiders; whether this was to take her mind off of the pain or because he was naturally gregarious, Frisk knew not. Abner was the spider that caught and kept her attention most frequently; from the sound of it, Muffet's realm was a very lively and interesting place, full of gossip and intrigue.
"And sos I says to hims, 'black widow, I hardly knew her'!" Abner roared (in his tiny, squeaky spider voice) one day. "That's what I saysd to hims, I swears on my momma! Ain't that right, Jimmy?"
"He swears on his momma!" another spider agreed from the other side of the bed.
"And sos, he looks's me's right in da eyes – all of 'em – and says 'Abner, sober up. Dis is serious! King Asgore says he's gonna invade the Queendom'! And sos I says back—"
Frisk's heart stopped, her blood turning to ice. Abner's little mouth continued moving, but she heard nothing besides her own heartbeat and the roaring in her ears.
"Could you…say that again?" She asked Abner, trying to keep the panic from her voice. Abner gave her a funny look. "Asgore is going to…what?"
"Asgore is gonna invades Arachnia. He marched a bunches of his Royal Guards downs into Hotland to's the border and says to Queen Muffet, 'we knows you gots da human; give me da human or else we'll takes 'er by forces'."
Frisk blanched and began to feel very dizzy. Asgore was going to…invade the Queedom. If Muffet was the Queen of Spiders, then that meant Asgore was coming…here. People were going to get hurt; die. These nice spiders that just wanted to help her, they were going to be trampled underfoot by the Royal Guard.
"Do you think…he's going to do it?"
"Asgore is alls bark and no's bite." Abner said smugly. Several other spiders chimed in agreeably with "bark no bite, bark no bite". "He tried tos invades Arachnia twice befores – once whens Muffet's great-great-great-great-great—well, her grandmomma from a longs times agos was on da throne, and again whens her great-great-great grandmomma was in charge. Both times-es, Asgore got his fluffy fanny whooped. Ya' can't fights a spider in its owns web."
"Damn straight." Somebody agreed.
"So's don'chu worry your pretty lil' face, Frisk. Queen Muffet's gonna kick fluffy butt again this time."
Frisk nodded slowly, still terrified as the spiders finished up their routine, trying to hold a conversation with them so that they wouldn't know how scared she truly was. She waited with bated breath for a long while after they left.
She had to get out of here. There was no way she could let Asgore hurt all of these people…yes, that's what they were – people; they may be spiders, but they were still people, and no matter what their track record for repelling Asgore was, she was sure that this time he would succeed. She would leave Muffet's queendom and turn herself in to Asgore. It was the only sane option at this point.
Frisk took a deep breath, bracing herself for what was to come. She propped herself up on her elbows, inhaling sharply at the pain in her gut. It was still there, but exceptionally better than when she had first awoken in the room. The girl swiveled on her bottom, throwing her legs out over the side of the bed planting her bare feet on the cold stone floor. With an audible grunt, she heaved herself into a standing position for the first time in weeks. She placed a hand on the bed to steady herself as a wave of dizziness and nausea hit. The girl looked over at the vanity table, at herself in the mirror; she realized that her shirt was completely cut off below the chest, and that she wasn't wearing pants at all – a necessity in order to use the bedpan. She grabbed a bedsheet, folded it, and tied it snugly around her waist so that it became a sort of calf-length skirt. If she was going to die, she wasn't going to die totally exposed. Such a silly thing to be worried about at a time like this, she thought.
Frisk placed a hand on the nightstand, shuffling over to the stone wall and transferring her hand to that, the other hand placed over the spot in her belly where most of the pain came from. She made her way to the heavy door and cautiously turned the metal handle, opening it very slowly so that she could peek out. The girl looked left, then right, down a pitch black hallway. Frisk grimaced.
"Eenie, meanie, miney…" she muttered under her breath. "That way."
So, the girl set off to the left, hobbling miserably to her death without being able to see her hand in front of her face.