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The next time the human summoned him to the pocket dimension, before either could speak a crackling voice sounded from… some device.
“It’s a radio,” the human said in response to Night’s unspoken question. “Gaster doesn’t want me bringing more monsters here, so I thought the radio might be a good compromise.”
From his corner, Dr Gaster scoffed.
The radio was giving a melodramatic soliloquy about the fate of a caterpillar chosen as a host for the eggs of a parasitoid wasp. The human frowned as they regarded it. “Not sure where it gets its broadcasts from. It seems to know more than it should.” They bit their bottom lip as the radio continued into a loving description of the agony of the caterpillar as the wasp larvae began to eat it alive. “I can shut it off, if you want.”
Night shrugged. He had read worse.
The human turned their attention to him and lit up. “Hey, you managed to get another outfit!”
“Oh yeah.” For a moment, he had put it out of his mind. He tugged at the lacy hem of his glove. “Portraits. People really like prints of me and Dream in different outfits for some reason.” It was one of the many things he hoped would abate when they became adults.
Mare sent him the memory of the two of them preening in front of a mirror and a note of questioning.
Or at least occur on our own terms, Night amended. Looking good or impressive he didn’t mind. It was everything else surrounding the whole event that bothered him.
“Ah, if this is an inconvenient time, I could send you back?”
Dr Gaster tched again.
“You never ask, Gaster,” said the human.
“No,” Night said. “Everyone’s so focused on Dream right now that they won’t notice I’m gone.” As long as he didn’t crease the outfit or get it messy in some other way, this would be a much better way to pass the time than being shoved in a corner and bored out of his skull until they called for him.
Dr Gaster put down his phone and eyed Night. “Symbolic?”
Night gestured. “Kind of? People like dressing us as opposites. They put Dream in yellow and white, so I’m in blue and black. Aside from that…” He really disliked this part. “They all associate Dream with the golden apples, so they get dressed up like one. And… I just get the dark apples.” Because Dream is the good apple and you’re the bad, slutty apple, Mare had commented when Night had groused about how short his skirts were. He didn’t like leaving this much bare at the best of times, and this would be carved in woodblocks for households all over the kingdom. He still found copies of portraits done when he and Dream were children.
We could put on a show… Give them a spectacle of what a real dark apple looks like.
No, Mare. But it did make Night feel better.
“Admittedly, textile production is not my forte,” murmured Dr Gaster. “Those are some very fine stitches.”
The radio interrupted with a joke about two scientists walking into a bar. Dr Gaster and the human gave it a dry look.
“Bit of magic in its production, I think,” said Night when the radio had fallen silent.
“My colleague has an interest in human tv shows, especially those of ‘magical girl anime’, and a genre staple is that the protagonists wear outfits like yours. I don’t suppose the genre is common in your village?”
Night shook his head. “Never heard of it.” He was only vaguely familiar with the concept of tv.
“Coincidence? Or convergent cultural evolution?” Dr Gaster muttered.
“Your colleague?” Night asked before the conversational opportunity closed.
“Dr Alphys,” Dr Gaster said with a fond smile. “Brilliant roboticist, among other things. Her efforts successfully integrated dimensional box technology with cell phones.”
“Oh,” said Night.
“Ooh! Show him the Alphys plush I gave you!” the human said.
Dr Gaster rubbed his forehead. “I don’t suppose you gave Night plush toys of his associates,” he grumbled, but he withdrew a plush of a yellow lizard in a lab coat regardless.
“Oh, yeah. They gave me a plush version of Dream,” Night said. As he fished for it, he got a glimpse of Dr Gaster giving the human an exasperated look and the human’s cheeky smirk in reply.
He held out the Dream plush to Dr Gaster, but the skeleton seemed hesitant to let go of the lizard.
“Go on,” said the human. “Where else are you going to see tiny skeletons?”
It seemed an unnecessarily mean comment, given what Dr Gaster had experienced, but before Night could gather up what to say, the radio broke in with a song that was little more than a cluster of notes and repeating lines about skeletons.
Dr Gaster relented, and the two swapped plush toys. On closer look, the fabric that made up the lizard bore a printed pattern of individual scales visible under the fur.
“Where do you get all these anyway?” Night asked.
“Trade secret,” said the human. They rested their chin on their palm. “If you can manage it, can you get me one of those prints?” They gestured at Dr Gaster with their eyes. Dr Gaster, for his part, seemed wholly distracted by the plush of Dream. Night couldn’t quite read his expression.
Aside from a general pensive melancholy, I don’t really have specifics.
Had it been for any other reason, Night would have been reluctant, but this seemed to be the closest Dr Gaster might ever get to having some token reminding him of the existence of other skeletons. He gave a sharp nod.
“Aside from a general pensive melancholy, I don’t really have specifics,” squawked the Radio, making Night and Mare jump.
Obscure sorrows #137: being unable to revisit a favourite fanfic because you initially read it at four in the morning while half-hallucinating from sleep deprivation and it turns out that the version you remember is not the version that actually exists.
~Prokopetz
The human had dismissed the radio, leaving the three (four, including Mare) in relative silence. The plush toys had been returned to their owners, and Dr Gaster was attempting to explain the plot of Mew Mew 2 and why it was a failed sequel to Night.
“You ever- you ever go back to something you really liked when you were younger and you realize you completely misremembered it?” Night asked. It was something that had been irking him for a while. Normally, he would speak about something like this with Mare, but Mare hadn't been a person long enough to have such an experience.
“Occasionally,” Dr Gaster said.
“I reread ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ and apparently I had it mixed up with Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’?”
Night had the undivided attention of Dr Gaster and the human, which made him feel awkward, given how unsure he knew he sounded. Something about either or both of the short stories he mentioned had fishhooked their attention. Neither mentioned whether or not they had read them, but neither asked for a summary or explanation. Night considered delving into an explanation anyway - "So, 'Omelas' is this really long description of a utopian city, with the author addressing the reader at several points, and then she reveals that all the prosperity and happiness is dependent on the suffering of one neglected child, and most citizens learn to accept it, but some choose to walk away. And 'The Lottery' is about these people in a small town having a lottery that's existed forever but in the end the winner of the lottery gets stoned to death." - but decided against it. They would ask for more information if they needed it.
“But even then, I think I must have included something else in there as well, because I swore there was this whole thing with the mom - Mrs Hutchinson, I’m sure - and whatever the thing was, it wasn’t able to be resolved because then the story slipped into dystopia? I wanted to see how the thing would play out, but I don’t even remember what I thought the plot involving Mrs Hutchinson was, because it wasn’t part of the actual story. Something about some issue with her kids, or whatever work she was doing with the mayor-like guy - the one who announces the lottery." Maybe with the daughter? One of the other kids was happy it wasn’t her. Maybe I extrapolated from that one line?
Mare gave the mental suggestion of a shrug.
“How does Omelas come in?” asked the human while Night struggled to piece together bits of his memory.
“Something about how… the author asks the reader to think about this village or city or - whatever. To think about how idyllic life was there. Or, well, they had problems and struggles and such. Little interpersonal dramas. But there wasn’t anything really overtly dystopian until the child in the basement. And I definitely remember the author addressing the reader directly whether these people - Mrs Hutchinson and the old guy and the kids and such - whether you found them easier to believe if everything existed as a result of this suffering child. And… I know the lottery part was involved, because I definitely remember Mrs Hutchinson drawing the black mark and saying how unfair it was, but I forget how I thought the lottery interacted with the child? I know it did somehow, because the stoning took me by surprise when I read it again.”
Night knew he was rambling, but the eyes (and eyelights) on him were expectant.
“Anyway, since I got the stories mixed up, I thought that the author’s whole point was that the child suffering was pointless, and that if there weren’t this random suffering child, we could actually see what happened between Mrs Hutchinson and… whatever I thought the interpersonal plot going on was. Like, the resolution of it. But I also don’t care because now they’re all revealed to be horrible people?”
Night, what the hell are you talking about?
Night wasn’t sure what sort of point or direction he was circling around. These were disjointed thoughts, about pointless suffering and negativity and narratives and positing some grand thesis about the dark side of humans and monsters and the sweetness of suffering when the story didn’t even focus on that operatic melodrama, but small foibles and relationship drama.
“I guess I’m annoyed because I made up the whole thing in my head, I guess. I reread ‘Omelas’ because I wanted to make sure that there wasn’t anything said about why the child needed to be in there, and then I realized that the story I thought it was and the story it was were very different.”
“Maybe you should write your version,” said the human.
Night shrugged. “Too many plot holes. I wanted to reread it because I don’t remember half of what the plot points were.” He gave a little laugh. “And now I’ll never know because I made it all up!”
Some of his frustration must have come through, as the human pet him on the skull, taking care to avoid the intricate ornamental crown.
“I still wonder,” Night said suddenly. “How long it would take for the citizens of Omelas to realize that the child was gone.”
"Within the hour is what the author says," said Dr Gaster. "Say even a single kindly word to the child, and within the hour, everything good in Omelas will be destroyed."
"That's assuming that what the kids are told is true, though," said Night. "From the way it's written, it could be the author telling us what is true or telling us what the citizens themselves are told."
“You’re starting with an assumption that's directly contradicted by the work itself,” said Dr Gaster.
“Not really? There’s honestly just as much narrative support for it being necessary as unnecessary, though.” Night found himself almost stumbling over his words as he raced to voice his thoughts. “Le Guin describes Omelas, then asks the reader whether you believe that a place like that is realistic, and then asks why you’d believe that the Omelas that depends on the neglected child is more realistic than the utopia, even though there’s no justification in the narrative for it. Like, yeah, the author says that the rules are absolute, yadda yadda, but she doesn't say how it works, even something like ‘oh their energy source is negativity power’ or something. You can’t say the dystopia is more logical, because there’s no explanation how the child’s suffering allows Omelas’s prosperity. It’s just… stated. It could be wrong.”
“Mm, let's consider the world outside of fiction, then,” said Dr Gaster. “I don’t know of a real place that doesn’t rely on far, far more suffering than Omelas at its worst. If anything, you could argue that Omelas is more ethical that anything that exists, because it manages to reduce its suffering down to one child.”
“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” the human cut in. “Omelas is better than any place in the real world, but there are still people who walk away, because they believe that even that suffering is unnecessary. They don’t believe there has to be a scapegoat.”
“Naïve,” Dr Gaster murmured, looking away from the human.
“If you don’t believe that prosperity can exist without suffering, then you will find yourself justifying cruelties as ‘good enough’, though. Even if those cruelties end up being avoidable.”
“I’m not arguing this with you again,” said Dr Gaster.
“Again?” Night asked. Mare had perked up at that as well.
The two of them glanced at Night.
“We’ve had a previous discussion on this topic,” Dr Gaster said. “It ended poorly.”
The human rolled their eyes. “It didn’t end poorly. Gaster’s just salty he lost.”
The more they said, the more Night’s curiosity piqued. “What happened?” he tried again.
Lover’s spat? Mare suggested.
Oh god I hope not.
“Irrelevant,” Dr Gaster said. “I’m not continuing this discussion with them-” He glared at the human. “-but I am interested in what you have to say. You have a unique perspective, given your experience with humans and monsters interacting.”
Is it really that unique? Dream should have a similar experience on those grounds.
Maybe he doesn’t really see your life as real. He knows you, but everything you say might as well be an interesting hypothetical, said Mare. Not out of malice, just distance.
Hmm. Night did feel a similar shortcoming when Dr Gaster discussed his own life. He remembered the plush toy of Dr Alphys and tried to imagine a life-size version interacting with Dr Gaster.
"Careful, Gaster," the human teased. "I could very easily send Night home, and then you'll have to keep talking with me."
Dr Gaster scoffed, but Night had a sudden jolt when he realized how much time had passed.
"I, um. I might have to get back anyway," he said.
Gonna pretend we're Mew Mew? Kiss the girls and boys and make them cry?
You would like that, wouldn't you? said Night, though he found himself standing straighter and resounding Mew Mew's catch phrase as he readied himself to run the gauntlet back home.