Ayyy, it's another exposition chapter.
Fun!
"…I guess this explains why they're attracted to Chara…?" Betty said to Alphys, while watching Frisk play with Lemon Bread. "I mean, it's no surprise that Chara's attracted to vampires, but I guess since Frisk is apparently just attracted to dangerous things in general…?"
Frisk heard them talking, but completely ignored them since they were having too much fun humming and flexing with an amalglamate that was apparently named Lemon Bread. Probably because it smelt like lemons, they thought.
They headed past a sink, but stopped short as they saw some goop come out of the tap and overflow into the basin.
"Are you serious?" Alphys sounded annoyed. "I told them not to do that anymore!"
The goop turned into a bunch of wavering figures that were glitching around and making a horrible static sound. Alphys pulled a phone out of her lab coat and voices started coming out of the receiver. It was still pretty distorted, so it sounded something like this…
"C̨̫̼̞͍͕ͤͮͬ̒̀Ǫ̢̖̫̞̼̖͇̬̰͉͐͂̈́ͬ̃͠m̅̈̔̎ͫ͏̱̩͉̤ȇ̫̹̞̲̘͕̯̯ͥͭͤͫ̚ ̣̤͙͈̞̤̟̓ͨ͜j̛̯̻̬̐͆͘Ǫ̶̗̠̳̝̔̄͂͌ͥ̆͐͒̕ͅIͦ̂͒̆ͫͤ͡҉͓̣͍Ň̛͈̮̙̖͚̟͖̔̋ͥ́ ̨͆͐̑ͭ͂̄̈͐̊҉͔̗̭̖͈̮̤t͚̜̦͍ͭ͟͡ͅḨ̺͙̩̙ͧ̊͐̍ͭ̾e͇̯̹͊̒͆ͣͪ̔͊ͅ ̺̩̍F̢̡͎̘͓̰̣̝͂̿̊ͤ̔u̧̟̳̹̟ͤͬͧ͢N̜̹̅͑ͪ̉́͌ͬ"
Everyone hastily refused, even Frisk, since they were a lot more creeped out by these things than anything else down there (so far).
"Sorry about the Memoryheads, Frisk. No one really knows what they are, but they seem to hang around in the lab most of the time… even if they're usually in the vents and pipes." Alphys apologised.
Luckily, they soon found something that kept their mind off of the Memoryheads pretty well…
"Is that… a dog?" Frisk squealed in excitement as soon as they'd finished talking, and ran over to play with the dog(s?) They pet it, they played with it, they pet it again, they pet it another time… and then, just for good measure, they pet it one last time before leaving to explore the rest of the lab.
"Well, Endogeny looks happy now…" Betty commented, following Frisk. She and Alphys were having a lot of fun watching everything go down.
Whilst walking through a hall of mirrors, Frisk was shocked when something came out of the mirror where their reflection was. It seemed to be a pretty scary fusion of an Astigmatism, Final Froggit, and Whimsalot. At least its monsters were identifiable…?
"Reaper Bird! I told you not to hide in the mirrors so you can scare people!" Alphys scolded it, while holding a hand over her heart dramatically. It just melded back into the mirror while making a sound that sounded vaguely like laughter.
They saw other indiscernible shapes lurking around that retreated when the three of them approached every once and a while, but the last amalglamate that Frisk properly met was one who seemed to have retained a lot of its functions, surprisingly. It also seemed to have mostly kept the form of only one monster. Apparently the dominant monster was the wife of the MTT Resort comedian and the mother of Snowy the snowdrake.
"At first she wasn't very good at doing anything much, but now that she's got a regular schedule for meeting up with Snowy and her husband she's probably the smartest and most progressive amalglamate here! We've got high hopes for her recovery." Alphys explained proudly.
"Where did the names for all of these things come from anyway? 'Endogeny,' 'Lemon Bread,' 'Reaper Bird…'" Frisk asked as they all headed back to the elevator.
"Well, Sans came up with some of them, like Endogeny, but lots of them actually came from nicknames that people used for them that kind of just stuck. For example, Reaper Bird was Chara's nickname for it, and everyone else started using it after a while." Alphys replied, while fiddling with the lift's authorization panel thing.
"Huh. Cool."
Alphys activated the lift again and they all started heading back up to the part of the lab that was mostly just used as a living space for Alphys and Betty.
"Speaking of Chara…" Betty began, with a cheeky grin on her face.
"No. Nope. I don't know what you're going to say, but I don't want to hear it." Frisk replied immediately.
"Awww, that's no fun." Betty pouted as the three of them exited the lift.
Frisk decided it was time to change the conversation topic. "Hey Alphys, you never answered that question from earlier. How's the substitute going?"
Unfortunately for them, Alphys didn't let them drop the subject. "I thought you said that you didn't need that anymore?"
Betty snickered and Frisk glared at both of them until Alphys actually answered the question. "It's going well, actually. But seriously, do you even need it anymore?"
They thought about it for a bit. "Hmm. Maybe not, but can you please make it anyway, just in case?"
"You mean in case Chara doesn't let you-" Betty cut in, but luckily for Frisk, before she could finish a distraction came in the form of Chuck being confused, annoyed, and slightly panicked as he burst into the lab.
"How long has Undyne's house been on fire?!" He asked in a shrill voice.
"It's still on fire?!" Frisk laughed. "Boy, that cooking lesson went very badly. It was fun though. To answer your question, it's been on fire for like three or four days now. Undyne's at Sans and Papyrus's house."
Chuck huffed and left the lab in the direction of the River Person, again, muttering something about how he couldn't leave her alone for one cooking lesson without something being set on fire.
"I didn't know about that either. You must've set it on fire after I left for New Home." Betty commented.
"Yeah, it was after doing some of the shows for Mettaton."
"Oh, really? I'm fairly certain Chara enjoyed those shows. Like, a lot."
Frisk looked annoyed. "Could you stop bringing that stuff up?"
"Fine. But only because you're not being all flustered anymore. It's no fun."
"Why are you even being like this, anyway? For all you know, I'm a highly dangerous murderer who's here to kill you all."
"Mmm. That would suit Chara's tastes, I guess. But I don't think so. You've been mostly harmless so far – actually, you've been, like, completely the opposite… which is lots of fun in case you didn't know. Apart from the whole beast thing, of course, but as far as I know that hasn't hurt anyone yet."
Frisk ignored the fact that that last bit was completely wrong in favour of asking, "How do you even know about the beast thing?"
"Because I live in a place that has access to the cameras all over the underground, duh."
"Oh… yeah. That makes sense. I don't suppose either of you know about my other form, though?" Frisk questioned as they headed for the exit of the lab.
"Wait, what other form?" Alphys and Betty asked at the same time.
Frisk laughed as the automatic doors to the lab opened to let them out. "You don't know? That's great. It'll be hilarious when you find out."
They waved goodbye and sped off before the two scientists could ask any more questions. Did they know where they were going? Of course not, just that it would hopefully be somewhere interesting.
Chara sat, fuming, in their room. They could not believe the nerve of their siblings! To just… stand in their doorway and… listen to them being sad… and then LAUGH at them?! Ugh! And then almost all of them ran off to god knows where. Actually, for some of them it was easy to tell where they were going, but that was beside the point.
The point was… uh, the point was…
…they were being mean! Yeah, that's it! And, uh… that's totally not hypocritical at all!
Chara sat there pouting for a while longer before a couple of thoughts appeared in their head.
...I wonder what Frisk is doing... I wonder if they'll… come around some time…
…I wonder if they're… hungry…
They quickly cut off that line of thought, but not before they'd turned quite red and some… interesting scenarios had popped into their head.
They decided it was a good time as any to have some chocolate, so they grabbed some from their secret stash and started eating it, hoping it would distract them from everything. It was working for a while, but then they heard a knock at their door.
"Who is it?" They grumbled through a mouthful of chocolate.
"My child, are you eating something in there?" Toriel's voice came through the door.
"No!" Chara lied, while stuffing their chocolate back where it came from.
"May we come in?" Asgore's deep voice resonated through the room.
"Yeah, okay." Chara replied after they'd properly hidden everything. The door opened and their adoptive parents entered the room.
"Greetings, Chara." Toriel smiled.
"Greetings, mother. Father. What brings you here? Shouldn't you still be working?"
"We took some time off of work to discuss something important with you." Asgore looked rather serious. Chara raised an eyebrow. Toriel soon turned serious as well. The three of them all sat down in the room, which was a bit crowded at this point.
"Yes. We've heard some things from Sans regarding that new human that fell down…" She began. Chara turned bright red once again, and lost the regal manner that they usually had when talking with their parents.
"U-uh, what kind of things?" They asked nervously.
"Before we tell you, can you promise that you will not speak a word of this to anyone other than Sans, Toriel and myself?" Asgore's question managed to make Chara curious enough to ignore their embarrassment for the time.
"Woah, this really is important. Okay, sure. I promise."
"Good. So, you know how Sans is a part time judge, because of his ability to see people's EXP and LV, correct?" Toriel asked.
"Yes. You told us that you found out about that when you were chatting to him one day to check on whether any new humans had arrived, and he commented on how you'd barely killed anyone even though you were in the war."
"That's right. Now, you are also aware of him being a part time scientist as well, correct?"
Chara nodded. "I assume you're leading up to something with this?"
"We are." Asgore confirmed. "As you know, Sans worked with Betty and Alphys when they made the amalglamates, and is currently still working on fixing them. But what you probably don't know about is the other research Sans does in secrecy for us, especially since he does it in his own personal lab. Even Alphys doesn't know about this, it's just the two – well, three now – of us and Sans himself."
"That's interesting, but why are you telling me?"
"Patience, my child. We will get to that eventually. But first, we will explain what the research he does is." Toriel chided. "To summarise it, he researches time distortions, as well as what he calls 'timelines.'"
"Oh. Oh." Chara suddenly understood why their parents were talking to them of all people about this.
"I see you know what we're talking about. Well, to answer your earlier question, Sans took note that you were able to remember the time manipulations that he believes to be caused by the beast-like human. This was not completely unexpected, however – the manipulations or the fact that you remember them." Asgore explained.
"What? Why would you expect something like this?" Chara asked, bewildered.
"Ah… Well, you remember when Alphys, Sans, and Betty extracted determination from all of the humans? Before they did that, Sans studied the DT levels in everyone. You had the highest out of all the humans."
"Wait, how does determination help people turn back time? And why is everyone else unable to do it, other than Frisk?"
"Oh, did you get the new human's name?" Toriel asked curiously. "What about their number?"
"Mum!" Chara felt the blood rush to their cheeks once again. Toriel chuckled.
"Sorry, my child. I could not resist. Back to the matter at hand. We do not know how the time manipulations are caused, or how determination affects anything. Sans told us that he was hoping to get a DT reading on this 'Frisk' so that we may find out."
"Right. Okay." Chara took a second to calm down, before asking their next question. "How did you expect these manipulations?"
"Sans apparently constructed a machine that tracks them a while ago, and marked down that around a couple days ago was when they start happening. He says that there's a while before the next one at this point, but that then they become very frequent."
"Hm. That doesn't sound very good." Toriel and Asgore nodded in agreement, then stood up and headed to the door.
"Well, that is all, my child. Be sure to keep all of this in mind the next time you meet Frisk… even if you're on a date." Toriel and Asgore both laughed as they exited the room. It seemed teasing Chara about their totally-not-crush was becoming a family activity.
Don't worry, the real Charisk will be happening (relatively) soon.