"You lost Frisk?!"
"Uh, nah. She disappeared."
"What do you mean "she disappeared"? Sans, tell me what happened!" Toriel was insistent, restless, both anguished and furious. It was a good thing most monsters in Snowdin had gone home for the night, her voice would have drawn attention to them. Sparks of white magic were already crackling in her palms and Sans thought it was preferable not to make her more mad. He had already seen Inny Keeper losing it when her eldest son had gotten lost in the snow; he was not going to be the subject to a worried mother's wrath.
"I didn't let go of the blanket, it's still at home. But Frisk was asleep and… well, I took a nap as well and when I woke up Papyrus was home and she was gone. I looked around the house, nothing."
"But how is this possible? She cannot have gone out, she's not even tall enough to reach the front door's handle…" Toriel now seemed more worried than angry, and Sans shamelessly felt relieved.
"No idea. Besides, I would've hear the door shut close. It's weird, to be honest. Humans don't phase through walls, right?"
Toriel sent him a glare that very clearly meant "no", and Sans could tell because his brother always used that glare with him. She sighed, her eyebrows furrowed, he forehead wrinkled by worry. Suddenly, her eyes lit up as if figuring something out. But how could that be? "Not the wall…" she whispered, "the floor." Sans sent her an interrogative gaze, but she didn't care. "Sans," she said, turning to him with a worried, almost hesitating look. "Have you ever heard of a talking flower?"
"You mean the echo-flowers?" the skeleton asked, more troubled than he'd let show.
"No, no, not the echo-flowersn", Toriel said, dismissing the hypothesis with a swipe of the hand. "A talking flower… Advising, threatening. A tiny golden flower."
Sans was silent for a moment, unfathomable eyes above his still grin. "Paps told me about a tiny flower talking to him sometimes. I thought someone was pranking him."
"Trust me, Flowey is all but a prank. This miserable creature has already attacked Frisk when she fell down here. If she's gone, I can only think of him as a culprit."
Sans had a thoughtful look for a few moments. "Maybe, but could he really do this?" They stayed silent for a few moments.
"I can only think of him." Eventually repeated Toriel. "We should find him as fast as possible to be sure. Although I do not know where we should look, he could be anywhere, and we are only two." She added with a worried look.
Sans sighed, looking as though he knew the solution, once more. "You're giving me a real workout…" he whispered, and Toriel wondered if he was talking to her or Frisk, wherever she was. "I know a way of seeing everything in the Underground. Or at least most of it. That should help us dig up that little flower."
"Really?" Toriel said, filled with hope.
"Yeah, but there's a chance we'll be seen."
"That's fine." Immediately said the goat woman without a trace of hesitation. "I just want to find Frisk before it's to late. The poor thing must be in so much pain…"
Sans looked at her, almost admiring the devotion this woman showed for a child she barely knew. Old legends said monsters souls were made of love, mercy and compassion, made to love. Those were just old stories nobody talked about since the war. But monsters like Toriel reminded him of those legends. "In this case, we're taking one of my shortcuts."
Toriel blinked like an owl in daylight when Snowdin's snowy street suddenly led to a room as dark as night. "We're lucky," Sans whispered. "She must be upstairs."
"Who?"
"Eh, later." Her eyes started to get used to the darkness, allowing her to make out the features of a large tilled space. Nothing else, she could barely make out the shadows spread on the walls like a trail of slime left by a snail. She reached out in front of her to avoid running into anything but Sans was faster. His left eye lit up with a magic bright blue beam that swiped the room, revealing a messy office, and more importantly a screen in screen-saver mode connected to a control panel. Sans casually walked to it, followed by an unsure Toriel. "Okay, I'm warning you, I have no idea how this works."
"Oh, uh, that's fine, try anyway. Please." Sans scanned the panel and chose a black button in the middle. The screen lit up.
"Bingo." Sans pronounced, quite happy with himself. However, his joy didn't last very long. The screen showed the last thing its surveillance had been locked onto : the image of a short skeleton and a goat lady, facing away, gazing at a screen, appeared before them in bright pixels. "Well shit."
"Sans, what does it mean?" Toriel breathed, sincerely surprised.
"It means someone knows what we're doing."
Toriel didn't have the time to answer. The lights switched on and a startled gasp arrived to them from the other side of the room. Toriel and Sans turned around to find themselves in front of a young lizard-woman with yellow scales, wearing a scientist blouse and whose eyes were growing rounder than saucers behind thick glasses. "Hi, Alphys," Sans said with his eternal unfathomable smile. "What's up?"