"Fuaaa... Man, what a day!" Frisk sighed as he put on his sweater, the uniform folded on a chair. "Glad to go home, finally."
He was done with his ambassadorial duties, and for quite a while. No more nervousness about preparing a speech, or hours of intense thinking. Now he could enjoy the rest of the week doing what he wanted: relaxing. This thought was so seductive that Frisk let out a long, loud yawn, feeling tears well up in his eyes.
Becoming the monster ambassador was a heavy and grueling responsibility, but he would never regret; Frisk was sure of that. Although, the child was eager to get back to more ordinary activities, like playing soccer with his friends, having picnics together, improving his flirting skills.
And many others like this.
What the others did today ? Frisk wondered, packing up his things while he guessed what the other members of his entourage had accomplished.
Alphys and Sans – but especially the first – must have spent the entire day on their research. Toriel must have been home from school a while ago and was probably preparing dinner. And Asriel...
Frisk stopped his activities momentarily, as he thought about the young monster had done after he left. Did little Boss Monster stay at home? Boring in their room? Did he hear the end of his speech?
The young human hoped so.
When he concluded it like this, Frisk had wanted everyone to know how much the child loved his current life with everyone, for multiple reasons; in particular, he had prayed that his brother would listen to him this evening. Because of my speech, we didn't spend much time together that month, Frisk regretted, although he couldn't have had it any other way. But now, he no longer had to spend long hours hunched over the desk, and the child decided: Forget for rest. I'll make up for it by offering to play together and do whatever Azzy wants for the rest of the week! We still have to finish our fight on Ultimate Smash Bro...
Vibrations in his pants pocket brought Frisk out of his thoughts, as he finished getting ready. He turned it on - a photo of everyone appeared in the background - and checked recent notifications: there had been a new one, received just now. Undyne – this was rather rare – had just sent a short text:
U: speed up to go out. wait for us ahead.
That was it, and a wary Frisk raised an eyebrow. Yet, even though the captain was not there, Frisk sensed the urgency behind this request. What is going on ?
The child typed out a response, telling he was leaving the room, and added a note about what was happening. The message was being sent, while Frisk moved his hand to the metal door handle and turned it to open.
* It doesn't move.
"Hm?" Frisk raised his nose from the screen, intrigued by the resistance he was encountering, and pressed it harder.
* It remains blocked.
"What the…" He shook the seized mechanism, which still refused to obey.
Something was blocking the lock, preventing the latch from opening. However, it was on the bright side: Frisk used this room often, and there had never been any problems before. No one could have locked him up without him noticing, and he doubted that the opening system had been changed.
Confronted with this unexpected difficulty, the child became impatient and, using both hands, he pulled with all his strength on the stubbornly locked door. His normally placid expression tensed with effort, groaning as his whole body strained back to unlock the door. Frisk used one foot to add energy to the movement.
"Ngh... Why... is it... stuck like... that?"
Undyne and Papyrus would soon arrive at the door; only three corridors separated the reception room and the room where he was.
If he waited too long, the mermaid would be capable of demolishing the entrance with a spear and dragging him by the scruff of his neck. No, she would definitely do that. This simple mental image made him shudder with fear, and Frisk pulled harder.
"Urgh, come on, dammit! Open up, stupid piece of wood! Open, open-ah!"
Sudden and unexpected opening of the door made him lose his balance. His fingers slipped and, carried backwards, Frisk fell onto his back. His head hit the hard ground; there was pain, and a flash of light exploded behind his eyes.
He shouted.
Then, nothing else.
-oOo-
Meanwhile, behind the door:
"HMMM..." Papyrus tapped a gloved finger against his humerus, seemed deep in thought, as he watched Undyne grumble at Frisk and his late.
The skeleton knew that she was especially upset by the intervention of the human who had come to meet their king, and he himself was not too reassured. He asked his agitated teammate:
"UNDYNE, WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS HUMAN WANTED TO SAY SO URGENTLY TO HIS MAJESTY?"
"Nothing good, I'll bet it," she grumbled, haunted by the image of the smug face of this crude man. He had made her so angry! No one had ever acted so casually in front of her.
Undyne swore he was lucky Asgore intervened. Otherwise, she would have been happy to paint his portrait again.
"Okay, punk! Stop admiring yourself and get out of there! I'm not in the mood to wait any longer!" the mermaid raged, banging wildly on the door, frightening a cleaning lady nearby who moved away. "Hurry up, or I'll come get you myself!"
"BUT FRISK MIGHT BE DRESSING!" Papyrus exclaimed, although Undyne dismissed his concern with a wave of her hand.
"Well ! He must have finished covering his shrimp body. You better get out, right now, or I'll tear the damn door down!" she warned the child on the other side, her pupil bright as she cracked her knuckles. If Frisk came here, she would have already joined Asgore to make sure everything was going well. This decrepit human who had entered the embassy might seem weak and insignificant, yet there emanated from him a real danger that raised her scales.
There was no way she left her king with this scoundrel any longer. However, their ambassador had to deign to show himself, so that they could take him into the car as Asgore had ordered first.
But the child remained silent to their calls, including the messages that she and Papyrus sent him textos.
As he wasn't no more here.
-oOo-
"Ouch... It hurts," the child moaned, rubbing his scalp, and winced as the passage of his fingers caused terrible electric shocks to the back of his skull.
What's happening? Frisk remembered managing to open the door, then falling and hitting the floor. I lost consciousness ?
Blinded into darkness, Frisk thought at first that his eyelids were still closed. But after he blinked them several times, the child realized that his vision was obscured by a cloak of darkness. Stranger still, only his body could be discerned from the darkness; unlike the wardrobe, the furniture and the room itself. It wasn't some stupid thing about a burned out light bulb. Everything around him had simply...disappeared.
Strange..
"However, I can perfectly distinguish my hand, and the rest of my body" discovered Frisk by raising a visible arm, waving with little fingers in front of his surprised but stoic face, before invoking his Soul which ; like the rest, nothing happened.
Maybe he had... moved? Somewhere out the embassy?
Frisk thought it. Here, whatever this place was, didn't feel like in the normal world. Neither on the Surface, nor back in the Underground. He felt like he had landed another, completely different and unknown space. FFrisk had no idea where he was currently standing.
At that point, anyone in his situation would have panicked and flailed around, screaming and shouting. Buut Frisk didn't act stupidly ; the child wasn't stranger to this turn of things. Not after he had fallen high up from a hole dug at the top of the mountain, in a kingdom of monsters wanting, for most and main part of the story, to kill him.
This familiarity helped him control his emotions; panicking wouldn't do any good. To get his bearings, he analyzed around :
* There is not much to see. Only darkness.
I need to know what I can do, right now. Frisk weighed his options; in front of him, his Soul alternated between the possibilities offered at that moment, very poor in choice:
|MOVE| ❤ |CRY| ❤
|WAIT| ❤ |CALL| ❤
The child gave himself a moment to think; then, he took a deep breath, ready to give it a try.
|CALL| ❤
Bringing both hands into a funnel to his mouth to amplify his voice, Frisk screamed: "Hey! Is someone there? Undyne? Papyrus? Asgore?"
His noisy call dispersed in this immensity, before running out of steam and falling silent.
.
.
.
* But nobody came.
None of his friends, if they were there, answered him. Frisk had expected this result, although disappointment gripped him briefly. No no no. Remind : stay determined, Frisk. You'll get through it, as usual! he encouraged himself. The others will eventually notice that I'm no longer there. I just have to be patient.
Frisk took another option, wisely deciding that he should be no more lost than he was now, and sat quietly cross-legged on this...nothing. They would eventually come and find him: the child had faith in his friends.
|WAIT| ❤
-oOo-
"IT'S STRANGE…" Papyrus commented, raising a bony brow, and showed Undyne his phone and the many unanswered calls to Frisk. "NOTHING HAS BEEN READ AND I'M GOING DIRECTLY TO FRISK'S VOICEMAIL."
"Weird. It's not like Frisk to leave us stranded," the soldier admitted, while Papyrus dialed the young human's number again as she knocked on the door for the hundredth time. "Frisk, are you snoozing?"
No answer.
Undyne lowered her arm, taking a loud breath. They could not wait any longer, and the child not showed signs of life. She was starting to really freak out.
While her teammate groaned at the voicemail of their desperately absent human friend, Undyne grabbed the handle to go inside and get the little straggler. First, the other jerk who's messing with Asgore, now Frisk. If he ever practices his stupid faces again, I'll knock him out mercilessly, she swore, before warning him one last time: "Frisk, you better be ready or-"
Lock !
The bolt held the door in place, not moving an inch as she pushed. Undyne widened her single yellow eye, thinking she was dreaming. "What the..."
The merfolk scowled and insisted, grinding the metal in her webbed palm. She braced herself against it, the muscles in her arm bulging under the pressure she was exerting. However, the entrance remained inaccessible no matter how hard she used it. Her face scrunched up comically with the effort, a vein throbbing in her forehead as Undyne let numerous curses escape her mouth, including the word "F***"!
After one last push, Undyne forfeited. Stunned, she stepped back, bending and massaging her scarred hand. When the pain subsided, the fish monster decided to take a new approach.
"A PROBLEM, UNDYNE?"
"No, Pap, I can manage," she assured the skeleton who was watching, too proud to recognize her difficulties, before returning to her business with a serious expression. "Okay, let's try this: three quarters of a turn to the right, half a turn to the left..."
-oOo-
Everyone knew it, the human race were creatures devoid of magic. Although the Angel had endowed humans with a power surpassing that of monsters to preserve balance, men had become jealous of the gifts of their neighbors, whereas so few among them possessed apart from the very restricted circle of magus families.
At first unsatisfied by they considered to be an injustice, more at learning that monsters could be more powerful by absorbing their Soul to become godlike, this feeling had mutated into fear and devastating hatred.
Asgore remembered well those darks times, a millennium ago; young goat, the prince had just succeeded the previous king, his late father. At this time, the era of peace that had once existed between humans and monsters was disappear. Then, shortly after his enthronement, the conflict had reached a point of no return, where he saw his subjects suffer from the war. So much chaos, destruction and death had fallen on his people without them being able to really defend themselves against humans and their Determination to destroy them; finally, they had been condemned to eternal imprisonment by the magus, those who had once been their friends and brothers, having decided to side with their people.
Today, sitting in his seat, the current king of the Underground looked sadly at Senator Jordan, and this man reminded him of those humans full of hatred who had mercilessly massacred them.
"Admit it, you have no intention of sharing these lands with humanity!" argued the old man, accusingly towards the king of monsters. "Your beautiful words are just an illusion intended to deceive us! You won't make me believe that after an eternity of imprisonment, monsters don't demand revenge!"
"Why, by the Angel, would you think we are plotting revenge on humans?" Instead of being offended, Asgore rather took pity on this individual consumed by paranoia and distrust.
He knew it was futile to try to change his view of monsters, like those humans in the past. Their stubbornness in clinging to their beliefs was sometimes a real curse, for which his people had paid dearly. He did not want to force the human to believe him, an impossible task even for young Frisk, and the Boss Monster preferred to close this endless debate so as not to drag on any longer.
"Senator Jordan, I hear your doubts, but believe me they are unfounded. I will not hide that we harbored resentment against humanity. However, things have changed. My people and I don't hide other motivations, but peace and reconciliation. That's all. Now, allow me to take my departure." The goat stood up and bowed to the old man, who had not uttered a single word.
As Asgore was leaving to join his companions and prepared to leave the room, the senator's icy voice rose from behind his back:
"If your intentions are so noble, then explain this to me before you leave: why, fifty years ago, a monster resembling you and who could not have crossed the Barrier without absorbing a human Soul, introduced into an ancient, now abandoned village not far from the mountain, carrying with him the inert body of a child?"
Immediatly, Asgore turned to him, and the shocked expression of the monarch betrayed him. Seeing his perfidious face show satisfaction at his reaction, the king understood - too late - that he had just fallen into his trap. Senator Jordan continued, scathingly:
"I guess you knew, didn't you? However, you have never said that one of yours was once able to overcoming the spell. Fortunately, I remembered this old rumor ; recently, I have found a resident who remembered this day. His witness could be precious, especially if it turns out that the monster still lives. Isn't it, King of the Underground?"