Undertale spoilers!

I don't own Undertale. First world problems.

I hurt all over.

I'm… alive?

Where…?

I wasn't expecting to wake up at all. After what I'd done, I was hoping to have died in the lava. I guess Karmic Retribution wasn't letting me off easy. I sat up and looked around. I appeared to be in some kind of hospital. No, not a hospital. Probably the lab. The royal scientist's lab. Looking down, I noticed that I was wearing some kind of white hospital gown. At least, it was probably white at some point. It was covered in my dried blood in various places. It didn't really matter – Karmic Retribution would have fixed me up by now. The gown was a little long for me, and nearly dragged along the floor. I stood up, then promptly fell over again as pain shot through my legs.

What?

My wounds aren't healing?

No, that wasn't right. They were healing, but very slowly. Nothing like the 'broken leg healed in seconds' I had witnessed when I first came here. The glow was fainter, like it was unsure of itself. I remembered what Toriel told me about Karmic Retribution.

"It acts more strongly on those who have sinned, and can in fact do good to those who are good."

I killed Tuffet. In the eyes of Karma, I'm not the good person I was when I came to the underground. An unexpected wave of fury washed over me.

That's right. I'm a murderer. My power is turning against me anyway. I might as well kill all the monsters and be done with it.

I was shocked at what I just thought. How could I even consider that? It wasn't like some bad sci-fi fantasy drama where someone's mind is taken over by an evil spirit. I'd really considered killing them all.

My legs seemed okay now. I stood up, wobbled, but grabbed onto a nearby computer console to steady myself. As I did so, I accidentally pulled off a heart monitor and some other important looking wires that had previously been attached to me.

"Whoops," I said, as the heart monitor flatlined.

A yellow lizard monster in a lab coat walked into the room, saw me and quickly backed out again.

I could kill her right now!

Fuck off, mate. I told the voice.

I walked calmly out of the room and into a long, white corridor. It seemed like the lab only had two stories. The top one, the one I was currently on, had a long wooden bench with some kind of robot lying on it. Below the bench, there was a ghost, peering out at me. I jumped back a little, and the ghost melted backwards into the wall behind it. I took the escalator downstairs, where Sans and two others were drinking coffee. There was the lizard I'd seen earlier and another skeleton. He, unlike sans, had a longer face, with a couple of long, wide cracks in it. The unknown skeleton spoke first.

"Ah. I see you're awake. Quite the fall you endured. Your SOUL must be especially powerful."

"So I'm told." I said.

Who's this asshole to decide how powerful my soul is? I should just destroy him here.

The voice echoed in my mind again. "What the heck?" I asked. "I don't even know these people."

"you ok, buddy? you look like you've seen a ghost." Sniggered Sans.

I hesitated, slightly.

"Yeah, I noticed him."

"that's mettaton. alphys is building him a robot body so he can become an entertainer."

The lizard girl spoke up. "W-well, I just really wanted to help him, and he seemed so sad being incorporeal, and… and…"

She stopped talking.

"Forgive me." The other skeleton said. His voice was rough and seemed to scrape though the air. "My name is Dr Gaster. I'm studying souls in an effort to break the barrier to the surface."

"I read all about you in a book I found." I said calmly, my earlier, spontaneous hatred of him gone.

"Yes. My work leads me to some odd places. I'd love to study your soul, if you don't mind. Sans here told me that you were intrigued as to why Asriel is so powerful – and how he seems to be able to tell the future."

"That's right." I told him.

"Asriel is a special case." He said, eying me carefully. "He was a… failed experiment. We were attempting to build a synthetic human soul to open the barrier."

He walked over to a control panel and switched it on, showing plans for a human soul, similar to mine. This one would have been pure white, it seems.

"Souls are made up of seven traits. Justice, patience, integrity, bravery, kindness, perseverance and determination."

As he listed the traits, he motioned to a colour wheel on the control panel.

"Alphys and I were extracting determination from the one human SOUL we have currently. We discovered that it is the glue that binds the parts of the soul together – and binds them to life. Alphys attempted to inject some fallen monsters with determination in order to bring them back. It worked, for a while, but just like a model covered in glue, they began to melt and disintegrate. The thirty-ish test subjects melded together into four or five monsters. We call them the Amalgamations. Alphys also experimented with injecting determination into flowers. She picked them from the King's garden, unknowing that one of them was still covered in Asriel Dremuur's dust. Once injected, it brought him back to life as a flower."

I was silent for a moment. "So… happy ending?"

"Far from it." Gaster sighed. "A creature with enough determination is able to manipulate time, or so we believe. He plays with our lives like toys in a toy box."

"So that's what my deja-vu was about. I could partially remember when he messed with time. Sans told me a bad joke, but I already knew the punchline before it happened."

I turned to Sans. "That must have been what he was talking about when he said he couldn't believe he'd lost eight times."

"seven." Sans corrected me. "but yeah. that's what he meant."

"Why not just keep trying? Eventually he'd be able to kill us."

"asriel might be determined, but he's not very patient. he must have thought it would be easier to kill us in a different place – the shed's floor was limiting his movement. we're safe here because the floor is so tough." He tapped his slipper against the floor in an effort to make a clinking sound.

I was a little surprised to hear Sans say something intelligent. I assumed he was just a lazy comedian. Guess there's more to people than meets the eye.

"I see." Gaster murmured. I didn't like the look in his eye when he glanced at me. It was like he was a god, looking down on an insect.

"If you call out your soul, we can analyse it and show how much you have of these respective traits."

I closed my eyes and willed my soul to appear. Nothing happened. "Uh… how?"

"Let me do it." Gaster sighed and flicked my ear. The colour faded from the lab and we entered a FIGHT. My purple SOUL appeared in front of me. Its glow seemed somehow apprehensive. It didn't trust the scientists.

I should kill Gaster. It would be so easy now that I'm in a FIGHT.

I had to stop myself from reaching out and snapping Gaster's neck. What was wrong with me?

Gaster reached out and pulled me over to the control panel, where he pushed my SOUL into a heart-shaped slot in the panel. It's glow dimmed for a moment, then returned to normal.

I looked up at the monitor, which displayed the contents of my soul.

"There's a lot of purple and yellow." Noted Gaster. He was right. The colour wheel was around 40% purple, and maybe 25% yellow.

"Those two stand for perseverance and justice, respectively. According to our human history books, when those are combined, the owner of the SOUL will have the power to judge others through an ability called Karmic Retribution."

"So I've heard." I said grimly, flashing back to my horrific display of power when fighting Tuffet.

"According to our books, most of these humans died due to being killed by their own power. They became evil, and Karmic Retribution instantly killed them."

Oh… shit.

How soon will I end up like them?

This chapter was super long. Hope that's okay.

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