"I see Alphys is taking the spotlight this time!" Mettaton purrs as he rolls over to the yellow dinosaur, still in his calculator form. "Good job, darling! You're really stepping up your game! Though," he says, going a complete circle around the flustered Alphys. "You're really going to wear that?"
She looks down at her spotted pajamas. "W-what's wrong with pajamas? I just woke up!"
"Alphys, Alphys, Alphys." The robot tutts with a slow drawl. "One must always be ready for a show! Just look at me!" He strikes a pose.
You giggle. The eccentric robot never fails to put a smile on your face.
He's so annoying! Chara snarls. How can you find this endearing?
How could you not? You say back. He's funny.
They huff and you can imagine them pouting in the back of your mind.
"HEY!" Undyne snarls from behind Mettaton. "Can you not? Get these things off of me!"
You peek behind the robot to see Undyne wrestling with…mini Mettatons? At least 5 of them are flying at her with gusto and she keeps punching them back. But they keep coming. You remember these from when Mettaton fought you in the core.
Annoying. Chara repeats.
Mettaton also turns around, revealing the switch on the back. It's tempting for you to just flip it now, but, reasoning that there's no need to be rude, refrain.
"Why, with all your sneaking around the lab—for whatever reason—" (Even when she's distracted, Undyne's face still starts turning pink.) "You would've ruined my entrance! But—if you wish—" Mettaton waves a hand and the mini versions fall to the ground.
Undyne growls and dusts herself off. "If you weren't Alphys' prized creation, I swear to the stars—"
"PLEASE, FOCUS." Papyrus grabs Undyne by the shoulder—a risky move considering it's Undyne, but she just huffs angrily and backs off.
"R-right." Alphys mumbles. "I have a few files that I've never touched before because they had weird stuff written and drawn all over and—" She shivers. "—I was too scared to do anything with them. B-but if you w-want…?"
"THAT WOULD BE VERY HELPFUL."
"T-they're stored in…" Alphys trails off. You follow her gaze to the…ah, of course, the elevator to the true lab. "Uh, y-yeah, I can go grab them. I guess. Make yourselves comfortable, u-uh, if you want."
She blushes, then nearly trips over her tail as she basically runs to the elevator and shuts the door.
You look around. Undyne and Mettaton seem to be engaged in a stand-off and Papyrus doesn't seem to know what to do, standing and looking around the lab with none of his usual energy.
"We'll get through this, ok? Don't worry." You tell him. It's almost comical, a child comforting someone twice their height. But you can't just leave him alone like that.
Papyrus looks at you and grins. "OF COURSE, HUMAN. WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS. THOUGH I'M NOT SURE HOW AT THE MOMENT." He gives the giant bag of dog/cat food a look. "BUT, WITH THE GREAT PAPYRUS AT YOUR SIDE, WE WILL DO GREAT!"
Too optimistic, and for no reason. Chara remarks.
"That's the spirit, darling!" Mettaton cheers.
"YEAH!" Undyne roars. "We can punch our way through any problem!"
"I'm not sure if that would work this time." You tell her, to which she gives you a massive toothy grin. You are suddenly reminded that you haven't even befriended her in this timeline yet. The fact that she's not trying to murder you right now is astounding.
"Yeah, right. We'll tell that to the problem when it meets my FISTS!" She punches the bag of food so hard that half the contents come flying out of it. You wince as the food slides across the smooth floor.
The elevator door slides open. "W-what happened here?" Alphys squeaks as she stumbles in, carrying a stack of boxes taller than she is. Immediately, she trips over one of the food bits and falls flat on her face, the boxes she was carrying flying halfway across the room. Paper spills out of the boxes and falls to the ground, making it look like you're in the middle of a blizzard.
"OH, DR. ALPHYS, ARE YOU ALRIGHT?" Papyrus rushes over to where Alphys is picking herself up slowly and pulls her up off of the floor.
"Oh—I'm o-okay." She says, adjusting her glasses and dusting herself off. She looks at the paper on the ground. "I-it's all a mess now though…"
"That's alright." You pick a piece of paper off the ground. It's wrinkled and torn, with ink scrawled in illegible handwriting that seems to change with each sentence. And, instead of writing how most people write, it seems like whoever wrote this just wrote whatever, whenever, not even bothering to flip the page around before scratching a note.
I doubt even whoever wrote this can read their own handwriting. Chara sniffs. What's the point of all of this?
"Information." You answer, muttering under your breath. "Anything would be helpful."
You can read that? Chara asks incredulously.
"No." You admit. "But maybe some of them are legible." Scooping the rest of the paper around you off of the ground, you look at the only table in the room. Which…is completely covered in what's presumably Alphys' own chicken scratch handwriting-covered papers and boxes. You decide to just sit down against the wall and attempt to sort the papers.
Which…seems more of a challenge than you previously thought, considering the first three papers you look through are more of the same ink blots and scrawls. Useless to you. The next few…
It's readable—if you squint until your eyes hurt, that is—but large chunks of the pages are completely empty. Some are just empty all the way. You throw those aside.
This one just has random letters on it. Chara tells you, even if you can just see it yourself.
"ARGH" Undyne yells in frustration a few minutes later. "These aren't even that useful! We could be here for hours and not make any progress! There's gotta be something else that we could do!"
"UNDYNE, WEREN'T YOU ALWAYS TELLING ME THAT PATIENCE IS KEY TO VICTORY?"
"I meant that during a battle, Papyrus."
"WOULDN'T THE SAME THING APPLY TO ANYTHING ELSE WE'RE DOING?" Papyrus shuffles the stack of paper he's holding and sets it down next to him.
"No! We're doing nothing!"
"The original reason we came here was to have Alphys look at the machine, right?" You ask. "We can go back to Snowdin."
"YES!" Undyne stands up so quickly that she might as well have teleported. "No more of this nerd crap! Let's go do more fun nerdy crap!"
She sprints out the door.
You pick up a box and start to follow, and the sound of shuffling tells you that Alphys and Papyrus are not far behind. Mettaton seems to have disappeared, somehow without anyone else noticing.
After a bit of finagling, everyone squishes onto the riverperson's boat without it capsizing and it grows a head and legs, running across the top of the water.
A few minutes later: "Tra la la. Everyone gets lost sometimes. Tra la la"
You look at the riverperson with a curious gaze. In all your runs, whenever you ride the boat, the riverperson always says something different each time. Most of which were just harmless phrases, talking about things related to the water, or to the location of Temmie village, or even about acorns, of all things.
Sometimes, however…
"Beware of the man that speaks in hands."
The riverperson turns towards you and tilts their head, the area under the hood they always wear dark and expressionless as ever. They pat the wooden boat and the entire thing shivers with a massive purr.
"Beware of other worlds out there. Tra la la"
You stare at them but they say nothing else, humming a little tune as they direct the cat-boat through a split through the river. No one else seems to have noticed your little interaction, despite the proximity that everyone is to one another. In other words: they are squished onto the tiny boat.
"Wha—" You start to ask, before the boat stops and you stumble.
"Snowdin." The riverperson announces. "Ride again sometime. Tra la la."
"Wait—" You scramble to ask, but then Alphys bumps into you and nearly knocks you into the river. Thankfully, Papyrus' quick reflexes save you from getting wet.
He waves his hand and the magic holding you suspended in midair plops you back on land. "HUMAN! ARE YOU OKAY?"
You smile and nod to the worried skeleton. Alphys also looks over with a worried expression. "I-I'm so sorry. I'm so clumsy.."
"It's okay." You smile at her. "The machine is over there." You tell her, walking over to the skeletons' house.
Papyrus runs over to the back of the house to open the door with the key that he had procured from…somewhere. He holds the door open as Undyne runs in the house with arms full of boxes, paper falling from them and creating a paper trail on the ground. Alphys scurries in behind, picking up all the paper that Undyne had dropped. You take the last box and carry it into the tiny room.
Papyrus ducks his head and enters last: the room was clearly made for someone much shorter than he is. Considering the fact that you're pretty sure Sans was the only one that came here, it makes a lot of sense. For someone that's your size, however, the room is quite a nice height.
Alphys pulls the drape off of the machine. It's…not very impressive, from the perspective of someone that doesn't know machines. Perhaps not even impressive for someone that does, but who knows. It's a drab thing, clearly just made of parts scrapped from a dump. As is what most of the tech in the Underground is, now that you think about it, but this one clearly had no effort but in it to make it look nice.
Classic Sans. That lazy skeleton probably doesn't even care. To be fair, however, you don't think Sans expected anyone except him to see this.
"What is this?" Alphys breathes. She drops the tarp in a corner of the room and attempts to tap the broken down screen on the top. It doesn't work, but a massive layer of dust puffs up in the air, forcing anyone in close proximity to cough uncontrollably.
Except Papyrus; obviously. The one blessed with no lungs instead disregards the machine and turns to the counter on the side of the room. On it are several pieces of paper, blueprints and such.
You finish hacking your lungs out, and—while your throat is still burning—you disregard it and pick up the nearest piece of paper to you on the counter. Instead of a blueprint, there's a faded picture of three indistinct people. Above it are the words "Don't Forget." Although the words aren't written in Sans' signature font, (guess which one), you think he isn't incapable of using other ones.
Either that or this was written by someone else entirely.
You disregard this when Alphys finally gets the machine to open. You watch her pry the cover off with a lot of yanking and sparks of magic, then descend into another coughing fit as nearly a perfectly shaped mushroom cloud of dust puffs up from inside the machine.
Rushing over, Undyne first goes to check if Alphys is okay, then sticks her head over the machine for a closer look. "This is just a bunch of wires! BORING! Papyrus! Let's go train in the snow!"
"BUT—" Undyne grabs Papyrus by the arm and starts dragging him to the door. Papyrus sticks his hand out and stops her with blue magic. "WHAT IF ALPHYS NEEDS HELP? WE CAN'T BE OUT THERE HAVING FUN WHILE SHE DOES ALL THE WORK!"
Undyne looks towards Alphys—as much as she could with the magic binding her—and Alphys signals to them to leave with half her body inside the machine, inspecting it thoroughly.
Papyrus huffs a defeated sigh, then releases the magic on Undyne. She immediately drags him out the door and hurls him with all her strength into a snow dune. Papyrus somehow manages to flip himself around and land on his feet.
You stare at them as they start sparring, the area around them darkening and turning black and white.
Turning back to Alphys, who's currently scribbling things on a notebook that she just suddenly has with her, you decide to just sit on the counter and watch Alphys work her magic. (Literally.)
She charges up electricity between her claws, and, studying the machine closely, she delicately places a claw inside the machine. Electricity hums and runs down her arm, straight into the machine.
It thrums with newfound energy, but then…
Something snaps. Alphys winces as the black smoke billows from the machine. "O-oh, no."