A/N: So basically I wrote the first few chapters when I was on break because I was bored and a wee bit obsessed with Undertale. Still moderately obsessed and people seem to like this. Hopefully more regular updates are in the near future. Also there formatting on this site just hates me for some reason, so forgive weird spacing that might come up.
"Ow…ow…owie…" Frisk mumbled quiet, involuntary utterances of pain as Jerith prodded her with a short metal rod.
"I'm sorry." He said apologetically as Muffet looked on from a chair beside the bed. "I'm not exactly experienced in treating humans. It's not like we see many down here." The man poked a particularly sensitive spot on Frisk's arm, causing her to yelp, swatting the rod away as she jumped. "Sorry!" Jerith threw open all six of his hands, dropping the rod.
Muffet giggled from her seat beside the bed, despite Frisk's condition. "Be gentle, but don't be afraid, Jay." She said. "It's not like you can hurt the poor thing any more than she already is."
"I think that's a very distinct possibility." Jerith said indignantly. "Human or not, she's my patient and I refuse to do her unnecessary harm if I can help it."
"So, why do you need to poke me?" Frisk asked bitterly.
"Well…" Jerith picked up the rod and placed it on the bed. "I've never seen a human in my life. I'm pretty sure no spider has seen one since Arachna was alive, and I'm highly skeptical of Dr. Alphys's work on them. Simply put, I'm poking you to see where it hurts so I can try to help you." He gingerly took Frisk's little ankle in his hands and squeezed it, causing the girl to wince. "See, humans aren't like monsters. Monsters are primarily made of a magical substance called victus; humans are mostly made of…water. I was only able to heal your stomach wound like I did because it was fairly obvious that certain parts shouldn't be torn or punctured like they were, but even then I wasn't able to heal you completely…" Jerith gazed morosely at the scars still present on Frisk's bare belly. "…as you know."
Frisk traced the battle scars likely with a finger. "I almost died." She stated solemnly.
"Almost is the important word there, dearie." Muffet consoled the girl. "I can only imagine the sheer willpower it took to get here from New Home in your condition."
Frisk tried to remember the journey back through Hotland, but found the memories completely lost. Why had she gone to Muffet instead of, say, Alphys? Come to think of it, why had Muffet taken her in in the first place? Before Frisk had woken up in that bed, Muffet had only ever been passive aggressively mildly cordial to her. Had her pocket-change offered in support of the spiders really meant that much to the queen?
"Well, you're alive now." Jerith said positively, trying to shake the girl from her foggy state. "And don't take what I'm saying to mean I don't know how to treat you. From the looks of things, human physiology is very similar to that of many monster from Snowdin – endothermic, four limbs, similar visceral and skeletal structures; it's actually quite fascinating."
"You see why he's a doctor and not a king, dearie?" Muffet asked with a snicker.
"I'm not a king because the succession laws governing the throne are matrilinear."
"Matrolinal?" Frisk cocked her head to the side.
"Matrilineal, dearie. It means the bloodline carries on with the women."
Frisk thought for a moment. "It's opposite with the human countries. It seems like a boy is in charge everywhere."
"Oh?" Muffet asked; it was her turn to cock her head as Jerith subtly jerked his head towards Frisk, sharing an unspoken conversation with his sister. The man moved to grab some supplies.
"The Emperor of Aquillia, the Badshah of Ardashira, the King of Utawala…Catai used to have an emperor too before the Long War, but the army got rid of him." Jerith returned to Frisk's side and began the task of applying a splint to her ankle.
Muffet continued the conversation as if nothing was happening. "Well, maybe that's why the humans are so divided – because they're relying on men to lead them."
Jerith rolled his eyes and opened his mouth for a moment as if he wanted to say something, but stopped, not wanting to draw Frisk's attention while he worked.
"Maybe, but is it really important if you're a boy or a girl when you're in charge of so many people?" Frisk mused.
Muffet looked at the human for a moment, studying her with an odd expression. "You're certainly wise beyond your years, dearie." The queen finally said. "You're quite intelligent for a child your age."
"Yeah, I, uh…get that a lot, actually." Frisk replied, watching as Jerith finished applying a bandage to a nasty scrape. The girl stared at the bandage with a puzzled expression before blurting out, "Why can I understand you?"
"I'm sorry, dearie?" Muffet asked uncertainly. "What was that?"
"No monster has been to the surface for a thousand years, right? Nobody except for the king's son?"
"That's right." Muffet answered, unsure where this was going. She glanced at Jerith, who looked just as lost.
"Well, my momma reads this old poetry all the time – I can barely understand it because they talked a lot differently back then. Why are you speaking the kind of Catainese we speak now – why are you speaking Catainese in the first place?"
Muffet smiled as she understood what the girl was asking. "That's the Tongue of Babel, dearie. You see, when the monsters went underground all those years ago, they came from all over the world and spoke all sorts of different languages. So, King Asgore casted a spell that spread across the entire Underground – everybody heard every language in their own tongue. It's really quite amazing."
"It is." Frisk agreed. "Magic in general is really cool. Humans don't have magic…not anymore, at least."
"Oh? How interesting…but I'm afraid we'll have to table this topic, dearie. You're done there, aren't you brother?"
"Yep. I patched her up as best as I could." Jerith confirmed, placing his medical supplies back in their proper storage receptacles. "She just needs to rest for…a few days, at least. I really don't know how long it takes for humans to heal. It seems like the wounds in her abdomen seem to be healed for the most part, as far as I can tell, but her little excursion certainly couldn't have been helpful. If I had some better way of looking inside her than the goggles, I could be more certain."
"Those silly goggles let you look inside people?" Frisk asked.
"Monsters, at least." Jerith answered. "When I tried to look at you, it was just very…fuzzy."
"Excellent." Muffet clapped her hands together. "Now to address the subject of what to do with you…"
"I don't understand why you didn't let me keep her here in the first place, Mira." Jerith said.
"The chance of her being discovered here was too high."
"So instead you put her at the back of an unused wing without any guards? And let workers see her daily anyway?"
"They were trusted servants of the clan, Jerith. Every single one."
"Well, what do you suggest now? Plenty of people saw her today."
"That number would've been much lower if you had, say, covered her with your jacket before bringing her here."
Jerith leered at his sister. "It's no use getting upset over it now. It happened, and it's only a matter of time before rumors start leaking out to the rest of the Underground. We need a course of action."
Muffet was silent for a moment, all six hands clasped together in contemplation. "We introduce her to the court."
"What?!" Jerith exclaimed.
"We reveal Lady Frisk here on our own terms instead of trying in vain to hide her."
"So, we're admitting to the Underground that we're harboring the human that Asgore Dreemurr is hunting?" Frisk blanched at the mention of her precarious situation, causing Jerith to frantically preform damage control. "Of course, there's no way Asgore would attack here – he knows that he can only fail, but still, announcing her presence doesn't sound wise."
"You keep saying Asgore can't win," Frisk interjected. "How can you be so sure?"
"You can't fight a spider in its own web, dearie." Muffet said with a smirk. "That's what Abner told you, isn't it?" Frisk looked away, afraid that she might have gotten Abner in trouble. "Well, he's completely right. Arachnia is vast and dark – only certain kinds of monsters can work and fight in the darkness, and even then they know nothing of the cavern's layout. Asgore has invaded this place twice – first with an army of five thousand monsters, and again with an army of ten thousand." Muffet giggled malevolently. "Both times, almost all of them were slaughtered within days of stepping foot in Spider lands. As with the war with the humans, it came down to numbers, skill, and terrain."
"…what do you mean?" Frisk asked after a moment.
As Muffet began to formulate a response, Jerith took over. "According to Asgore's census, there are only about three hundred thousand monsters in the Underground; there are so many spiders in Arachnia, we couldn't even begin to count them – the humans outnumbered the monsters in a similar fashion. While Asgore has fire magic and the brilliant inventions of Dr. Alphys and Gaster, we have complete mastery over shadow magic and our environment; likewise, the humans had metallurgy and an affinity for erecting entire fortresses in no time flat. And finally, while the fuzzy-folk of Snowdin are unmatched in the cold and the lizard-men of Hotland reign over the lava pits, we spiders can navigate our cavern with ease and even change its layout, while other monsters have difficulty even seeing. The humans used the environment cunningly and ruthlessly during the war, driving entire armies off of cliffs or chasing them to exhaustion through the desert. In these ways, I suppose, spiders and humans aren't too different."
Frisk had never considered factors like this. All of the movies and dramatized documentaries she had seen about the Monster War – the ones her mothers had allowed her to watch and the ones she had sneaked when they weren't home, at least – had been fairly simple; giant, organized human armies – Aquillian legionaries in bright red cloaks and silver armor; dark-robed Khurasani horsemen wielding curved swords; fierce, dark-skinned Utawalan warriors banging on their shields – all standing side by side to clash with hordes of big, terrible beasts led by a giant minotaur-like creature with a ring in its nose, wearing a crown stolen from the head of a Catainese princess. Most of them loosely followed the same sequence of events, but few had ever touched on topics such as geography or cultural affinities; when they did, it was emphasizing how the great human empires were coming together to function as one mighty machine – the farming of the Catainese, the industriousness of the Aquillians, the seafaring of the Sikainesians, and so on.
The human girl had evidently been in thought for quite some time, as she was broken from her thoughts by Jerith snapping fingers from several hands in her face.
"I was afraid you had passed out or something." He said, concern in his voice as he shined a light in her eyes. "We should really find you somewhere to sleep. You've had quite the adventure today…"
"Yes," Muffet agreed, standing. She took a lock of Frisk's dirty hair in her hands. "but first, we need to give you a bath."
Somewhere in the outer reaches of the cavern that made up Arachnia, a tunnel in the stone wall trembled. A long, angry sound echoed down and out of the entrance, a deep hissing. Slowly, a pair of eyes emerged from the tunnel's darkness, orange in color with elongated slits for pupils; they blinked, eyelids coming together vertically. A metal helmet emerged, somewhat resembling the shape of a human head, but with the forehead sloping back at an extreme curve and a handful of crests, like those of a bird, on top, and two slits through which its eyes peered emerged from the hole and looked cautiously in all directions.
"Clear." A raspy, male voice declared.
The create removed the rest of itself from the tunnel; first a humanoid torso with long, lanky arms that ended in sharp claws, followed by the extensive body of a snake, slithering deftly out and coiling up on the ground a few feet below. The entirety of the body was clad in dark, black metal armor that didn't seem to impede its movement. Three more tunnel entrances played host to similar births.
"That was almost too easy." The second creature scoffed in a feminine voice, although it appeared physically identical to the first.
"Don't get cocky, Thyxixa." The third scolded the second, its voice also feminine. "I'd rather not get paralyzed by a tarantula like Thalice."
"Not a fan of having eggs lain in your eye sockets, Lysixera?" Thyxixa mocked.
Lysixera's helmet, though it had appeared to be a solid chunk of metal seemingly carved and smooth to fit over the head, broke open on the bottom, a jaw lined with sharp, jagged metal teeth opening at an alarmingly large angle alongside a growing hissing sound. "Thalice was my friend you worthless garden snake."
"Will you two break it up?" the third creature, Zalysios, demanded, retrieving a small metal cylinder that had been strapped to his hip. On command, it instantly expanded into a long staff tipped with a deadly glaive. "The King gave us an assignment. We're going to complete it."
"And if at all possible," Thyxixa was almost certainly sneering beneath her helmet, "we kill as many of these degenerate insects as we can along the way."
"Well what are we waiting for?" Lysixera hissed. "Let's rip the soul from that little brat's body."