Other Half
Chapter 4
The skeleton stood with his bag at the university's entrance. His professor was holding a clipboard, calling out names. Sans would have preferred to take one of his 'shortcuts' to the underground, but he understood that the University had to account for all of their students. After the teacher called his name, he sat on the bus next to the person whose name came before his in the alphabet, and sighed as the bus began to deliver him to his destination.
The ride was a relatively sort one, but then again, everything seemed to go faster on the surface. Sans waited until he heard the instructor announce his name, and then went outside to wait and remove his luggage from the vehicle. All of the classes that would be staying underground during their break would go in Mettaton's hotel, which thankfully had way cheaper prices now that the star lived on the surface. Most students would room together, but he decided to live in his old home and teleport back by morning. The skeleton decided that he'd sit through whatever the college wanted them to do while they were down here, then visit all of his old sentry posts again once they had a little free time.
After a little 'settling in', as the instructors referred to it, or in his case teleporting home and back for a few minutes, he and his fellow students had a tour of Alphys' laboratory scheduled. Most of the university's engineering students hadn't seen the legendary building, but his brother somehow managed to become friends over Undernet with the certifiable genius back when they were still trapped underground, and after they met up in her lab for dinner, the yellow monster decided to show them around. She unfortunately left the actual lab out of their tour. The rest of those invited to dinner that night, including Papyrus, his brother's employer and friend , Undyne, and a shy friend of the scientist's, Napastablook, didn't know about the then secret basement. Sans, on the other hand, could clearly see that there was an entire extra layer to her workplace after teleporting himself there. He remembered acting as blissfully unaware of the true lab as his older brother and his host's soon to be girlfriend, but he knew of the area. Now that they were finally taking a tour, Sans longed to see where the actual human soul copying happened, and despite his nonchalance, he felt himself getting a little excited for the tour to begin.
What the skeleton lacked excitement for; however, was their boat ride to their destination. Mettaton upgraded the one boat that existed within the underground to become a full sized commercial cruise ship. The river was large, considering it was the main water source in the underground aside from the ocean, so it made business sense for the star to exploit it. Regardless of its economic benefits, that still meant that sans would be traveling over water for a considerable amount of time, and he couldn't just meet up with the rest of the class later without exposing his unconventional abilities.
Water travel made the skeleton nervous. For the most part, his discomfort didn't stem from an irrational fear. Actually, it came from a fairly logical place. If bending time, space and matter was difficult through air, and it was, doing so through or to a medium like water was even harder. Sans believed that he could potentially do it, but he'd have to spend years perfecting it, and the margin for error was miniscule. As a skeleton, the threat of leaving body parts behind or misplacing them during transportation wasn't as dire as it was for other monsters. After all, if he was missing a rib or something, he could find it in the area and locate someone with healing magic to piece him together quickly. The same couldn't be said for water. If he teleported himself from the middle of the ocean, he could bring gallons of water along with him by mistake, which could crush him. Or, he could be standing near a flowing body of water, then accidentally wash his skull away forever while teleporting. It was too risky, and he hated that he could put himself in a situation like that during water travel.
The smaller portion of his fear made him feel uncomfortable, at most. He knew the main issue stemmed from the legitimate concern that he could kill himself or others while traveling in water. Unfortunately, there was always an inkling of fear that arose when he considered the deep, dark watery abyss that existed in places like the ocean, where his feet were incapable of feeling the ground.
It seemed that Sans lacked the ability to just shrug off his issues this time around, so he was stuck rationalizing through them. The only good thing about that was that it helped make the boat trip go by faster, which meant that they finally reached the famed laboratory of legend. While Sans mainly enjoyed engineering and chemistry, he was a jack- of all trades when it came to science, and that meant that he was at least somewhat curious about the soul. He knew about how Alphys created the final human soul that broke the barrier, but didn't have a ton of details. Plus, there were a few gaps in the story that the skeleton would have liked to have been informed on, but he guessed that the information wasn't necessary for the average human being or monster, so it was never shared. His knowledge did include the story told for how and why monsters now lived on the surface, with the underground's genius scientist as its heroine.
Apparently, Alphys figured out how to duplicate the purple human soul that they already had in their possession, then add a little monster dust to make a hybrid being. The aforementioned duplicated soul could only exist for a few moments, but that was long enough for the scientist to bundle the previously captured human souls together with this one, then destroy the barrier. The souls, after breaking the barrier, were all (except for one) floating in the air surrounding the newly broken barrier, where they finally dissipated after years. Strangely, the duplicated purple soul wasn't one of them. Most assumed that it just dissipated into nothingness, or as an unstable soul just broke, but Sans couldn't find any actual evidence regarding what happened.
As the tour started, they went through the area where she created Mettaton's physical form. The lab transformed into more of a museum of Alphys' accomplishments, and thankfully, the tour was more inclusive than Sans hoped. The skeleton's attention faded in and out until they reached the true lab. Most students gawked at the size of determination extraction machines and her experiment journals, but Sans was busy writing down random data that he found at the ends of her journals in his notebook. The students were free to roam certain hallways, so Sans kept looking around at things, particularly the machine that she used to actually create the soul.
The notebook itself was a torn, loosely binded collusion of pages, but when he found the partially used item for sale one day in the waterfall, the skeleton was surprised to see that the item had numerous pages divided into three columns titled 'Good', 'Bad', and notes. The good and bad columns were checklists of sorts, and in the notes section, he could only find the names of monsters and places. In a few of the columns with bad checked off, instead of names he just found the word everyone. The strange journal that had been for sale was interesting enough, but he found two things that made the journal especially captivating. For one, the names in the notebook would always include key monsters in his life, and the other being that the handwriting was incredibly similar to his own. Actually, the handwriting was his; it was just in a style that he only used when he was serious. It was weird, but Sans noticed that his handwriting changed slightly based on his mood. The skeleton didn't know how the words were written in the book, but he guessed that the object appeared as a time paradox, generated from his teleportation throughout the underground.
Strange notebooks aside, Sans found that the answers he sought, including whatever happened to that duplicated soul, weren't there. He sighed after going through the last of her screen lit journal entries for the third time. The information wasn't there. If he wanted to find out what happened that duplicated soul, he needed to ask Alphys in person. A group of his classmates was crowded around the determination extraction machine, and some were pushing at the ropes surrounding the device to get a good picture. Sans personally didn't care if he could see it, after all, he could just teleport here if necessary, but he wanted to get an image of something from the underground for his brother. The skeleton surrounded his newly acquired cell phone with a blue aura, then, while still standing away from the crowd, actually levitated the device over to take a few pictures. At least he had something positive come out of this trip, even if it wasn't really for him.
Eventually they left and returned to Mettaton's resort hotel, where students would be free to roam the building, the underground, or even meet with other students that were on the trip with different classes. Sans took this as an opportunity to visit his old sentry posts, just for nostalgia's sake. The skeleton visited his first few in Snowdin, then even took the opportunity to knock on the giant doorway to the ruins once again. After checking one of the posts, he found that his condiment bottles still sat within the sentry station. After picking one up, the skeleton noticed that some of the goey substances were leaking onto his post, and definitely looked repulsive. He quickly looked at the months, possibly year old mess that lingered on the station, thought about what papyrus would say, and immediately threw the bottles in the trash.
It took him some time, but the station was finally clean. The skeleton began to feel proud of himself, until he realized that he had sentry locations in other places, and almost all of them would probably still contain forgotten condiments. He sighed in dread but transported to his next post to check for messes. As his horrible luck would have it, he found one. Or rather, he found multiple. Even worse, every location where he sold hotdogs, meaning every post except for the one in the waterfall, was dirty, so he had to clean all of them.
After a few hours, Sans wiped sweat off his nonexistent brow, then sighed. He finally finished cleaning all of those bottles, and he never realized that a day would come when he grew tired of ketchup. He smiled a little when he knew that his work was finally done, and looked at the time. He still had some waiting to do before trip advisors would come check that they were all in their correct locations, and fining nothing better to do, he decided to just take a scenic walk through the waterfall. It had been a while since he had visited the biome, and even with his discomfort with water, he loved the way the grass looked almost black, and the flowers seemed to glow. With a small sound of contentment, he closed one eye, then teleported over to his final unvisited sentry station.
It was too bad; really, that the trip had to be so uneventful, especially considering most of the students' hype for the event, but all he could do was hope that tomorrow would provide him with something exciting.
AN: Okay, I know Gaster and Chara were scheduled to appear, but I didn't want to throw it in without Frisk's pov too, and Sans just kind of got away from me, at one point. Plus, I needed to introduce this paradox notebook thing if the happenings of the next chapter were going to make any sense at all. So, here this is. It's a little longer than usual, and I went over my 1,500 word limit, so…yay? As always, thanks for reading! Also, thank you to Starryskys102 and GHOSTTHEDARKWOLF for reviewing!
Question: If you were a monster in Undertale, what kind would you be? (A ghost, a skeleton, etc.)