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It’s all very confusing. And you didn’t like confusing things. Confusing things meant there were problems to work out and there were puzzles to solve and that wasn’t your thing anymore-- it was more of your brother’s hobby nowadays.
So you slept. Nothing a power nap could solve, right?
wrong.
You woke up. You sat up and looked around. It was all white. There was no noise, just that empty static you hear because your brain tries to fill it with something in a desperate attempt to remain sane. You have never “noped” out of something so hard. You laid back down.
You tried sleeping again. Surely this was all a mistake. This never happened before; this was never a probability, never an outcome.
Okay. You figured it was time to stop sleeping-- you’ve slept for god knows how long and it still was there. Nothing. It was nothing yet it was so much nothingness that it was choking you, all this white blank space and it was so bright and blinding and it filled you with an empty feeling of…
loneliness.
You can’t afford not to care anymore. So you started thinking. Your research showed signs of timelines. That, was certain. You couldn’t recall the specific events in each, but you knew enough bits of information that could pinpoint different outcomes based on the anomaly’s actions. You had some knowledge on the various endings of a timeline, but there was never one like this. Somewhere along the line, there must have been…
an error.
What’s even stranger was that timelines were stopping and starting. Some timelines were cut short and a new one began. It was a simultaneous action; the cycle repeated over and over. The timeline could be halted, but it would either resume again or a new one would be born. The timelines could stop, but the cycle never did. This wasn’t a stop in the timeline. No, he couldn’t even get a sense of the timeline’s existence. It was like the cycle had been erased.
You concluded that it wasn’t the void. If one was to fall into the void, persay, it would be the exact opposite of what you were feeling right now. Falling into the void would scatter your existence all across time and space, never existing in one spot, but rather, everywhere. However, all you felt was nothing. It was like you never even existed to begin with. Not even from the very beginning.
You get up. You’ve been lying down for quite awhile now, coming up with various conjectures but disproving each one right after you’ve thought of it. It’s official; you had no idea what was going on. You started walking. You weren’t sure where you were going. There was no particular sense of direction here, was there? However, with what little hope you had, you channeled it into your legs, forcing yourself to step forward. You shoved your hands into your pockets. The old, familiar feeling of your warm pockets filled you with a sense of comfort.
It’s funny-- for some reason, your jacket looked darker than it used to be. Maybe it’s the lighting.
You’ve walked forever, it feels like. There was no end to the nothingness. You felt dizzy. There were no corners, cracks, holes, nothing. You weren’t even sure if you were moving forward or backward. Were you going in circles this whole time? Hell if you know.
You wondered what time it was. Before this, you was building a snowman in the forest with Pap. You made an excellent snow poff. You thought you had made a valiant effort (Papyrus wasn’t as pleased as you, though). You must have fallen asleep at one time, because when you woke up, Papyrus was gone. The snow was gone. You weren’t even in your house, you were here, in the white nothingness.
How many hours had gone by? Did Papyrus notice you were gone? Surely he must have, by now. You pushed it out of your head. You didn’t want to be thinking about that. The easiest way to go back is to sit and wait. “All good things come to those who wait”, right? You told yourself to be patient. You’d be back in Snowdin in no time.
You started dreaming about what you’d be doing, starting from the snowman building. Paps would have chided you by now, and you would have gotten out your ketchup bottle, sloppily squirting out a barely-legible Sans on the snow poff. He’d stamp his foot and get a hissy fit, which you would dismiss with a chuckle, taking it as your cue to fall asleep. Then, you’d wake up all warm and cozy on your couch (because your cool brother carried your lazy ass home) with the smell of spaghetti in the air. MTT News would be playing and you’d call to your brother saying spaGHETTI here, Mettaton’s on! , and Paps would grumble slightly but you would hear the clanging of pots and hurried footsteps and a new weight on the couch as your brother would hand you your plate, saying, eat up! You would thank him but also add in, but I’ve got no stomach for pasta. Cue the groaning, and etc etc etc. That was a general night in the skelehousehold.
Wow, you really missed that.
You were sleeping. More often than usual, actually. You can legitimately say that you’ve been closing your eyes more than keeping them open. You hoped to sleep it off. Hoped that it was all just a bad dream. It wasn’t though, and if it was, it was a nightmare that never ended.
You were losing hope. You could deal with the ongoing timelines, the resets, heck, even all that dust , but this? How could one deal with nothing? And it was so empty. So quiet.
So you began talking to yourself. You were desperate to fill the silence. You now have several puns for made up but likely-to-happen scenarios, and when you get back, Papyrus would hear every single one, same timeline or not. You came up with new knock-knock jokes, too! You were running low on material, and you needed only the best lined up for your friend behind the door.
But even jokes get old when there’s no one to tell them to.
When you talked to yourself, sometimes you’d make your voice louder than normal, hoping someone would hear you. Sometimes you’d sing. Sometimes you’d laugh. Sometimes you’d shout.
And sometimes you’d scream.
Those were the worst, honestly, but when you’d break and start screaming, you’d find yourself screaming for a real long time. You’d scream the names of everyone you knew, hoping one of them would hear your cries of help. Heck, even the kid. Best chance he had-- maybe Frisk knew what was going on. But mostly, you screamed for Papyrus. You missed him the most. You didn’t know how long it had been since you had seen him. But you knew it had been too long.
Toriel, Undyne, Alphys, Asgore, Mettaton, Frisk, Papyrus. Toriel, Undyne, Alphys, Asgore, Mettaton, Frisk, Papyrus. TorielUndyneAlphysAsgoreMettatonFriskPapyrusTorielUndyneAlphysAsgoreMettatonFriskPapyrus--
It became a mantra, something you held onto, for fear of forgetting their names. You couldn’t tell time in the nothingness. But you think it’s been so long since you’ve seen them that you forgot what they sound like. Give another few naps and you probably won’t remember what they look like. Sometimes, you don’t even remember what they mean to you. Well, most of them.
You remember Papyrus. You had to; it was your duty. You had to remember you were his big brother. You had to remember that he was the coolest brother ever. You had to remember his excellent spaghetti-making skills. You had to remember his unbending will to join the king’s Royal Guard. You had to remember his groans at your puns, his trademark laugh, his awesome outfit, and… oh. There’s tears. You’re crying.
Sometimes you got angry. You’ve been annoyed ever since you got here, but sometimes you threw major temper tantrums. But it was justified. You had made every effort to get out, you had even quit sleeping all together now, hoping that all this DETERMINATION would get you out.
But it didn’t.
And then you turned to screaming, pleading, crying out for help. You screamed into the nothingness for someone, anyone to come rescue you.
But nobody came.
It seemed as if the nothingness was laughing at you, taunting you, as if to gloat that it’s winning. You were so tired. You were so angry. You stomped around, spitting every curse out into the vastness of the area, all the while knowing no one could hear. You fell to your knees, banging at the supposed “floor”, over and over and you were now crying , hot, angry tears flowed freely. You didn’t care. No one could see you, anyway.
And when you finally stopped, it was quiet again. You laughed. And you laughed and laughed until your ribcage hurt. You were laughing because it was so damn hilarious because all your screaming and crying could never compare to the deafening, loud blaring of silence. You could scream all you want and the silence would scream right back at you, buzzing in your ears, pecking at your bones until all you are is nothing.
Maybe that’s the point. All you are, indefinitely, is nothing.
You don’t know when it started, but there was this one time that were laying down, looking up at your hand. You wiggled your fingers, and suddenly, blue strings appeared. They wrapped themselves all across your five fingers like marionette strings. You brought them closer to your face to examine them. The strings tightened and you saw that the loops of strings were attached to more strings, ending a few feet away from you. You sat up. This was new.
You yanked at the mess of strings harder. The tension led to the strings tightening once again, but the ends of the strings still remained a few feet away from you. You stood up. Pulling with all your might, the ends of the strings finally obliged, coming free from your forceful tug. With that was something newer.
( two new things is a row? this was gonna be a good day. )
The string must have been caught on something, because when you pulled it free, something appeared. You almost cried. Finally, a break from the white nothingness. It was weird. It was much like a screen you’d see on a computer. A screen window that displayed all your computer’s files. Except for your regular files, it contained various folders and documents on the Underworld.
You found out that you could sift through them using your hands. Reaching up with your fingers (the strings disappeared; that was weird), you clicked on various files. There were different folders containing people you knew. You saw Papyrus’. Hesitantly, you clicked on it.
Looking back from now, you wondered if that was a good decision. Exploring those files.
It was all a joke. It wasn’t a joke that you considered very humerus , though. But maybe all that nihilism paid off in the end, because you were a little right, weren’t you? In the end, nothing mattered. Because you didn’t have to exist in the first place. Neither did them.
It was all a game.
( heheheh, literally. )
You weren’t sure if this gave your comfort but it certainly did solve the occasional existential crises. All the research, all the anxiety. It didn’t matter. It was such a simple solution, but it was a terrifying one. You simply existed, all due to coding. In fact, you were nothing but audio files and JPEGs and txts and-- all you were was megabytes in a computer’s system.
Now you were so self-aware that you started to wonder when you were going to self-implode. You have transcended your life as you once knew it. You were so meta you couldn’t even deal, bro.
You have now memorized every single code and file in “UNDERTALE”. You know every bit of dialogue, which action would provoke another action, and every single ending was in your head in full detail.
When you got tired of reading codes, heck, you could even watch them. In color and HD, too. You discovered that with a wave of your hand, you could open portals to different timelines just to observe them. Your favorite was the true-pacifist ending, obviously. All your friends survived, and the kid made it back to the surface. You’d like to imagine that would have been you.
It gave you a sense of tranquility, knowing that there was a limited set of timelines that were possible. All that research was laid to rest. You knew every action led to a certain, definite reaction. The organization of the files gave you peace, knowing that there couldn’t possibly be anything other than the codes you memorized.
Until there was.
It happened randomly, like sometimes you’d be scrolling through the files, and there’d be one extra document. But when you reached up to click on it, it was gone. At first, you thought nothing of it. You were probably seeing things.
But then it happened again.
And then, once you saw an extra document on the screen, like a chain reaction, several more popped up, consuming the screen until--
ERROR.
in big, black letters, flashing all over your window and then your files crashed. You opened it again at once, but everything was back to normal. You spend hours scouring the codes after that, disturbed, muttering to yourself that it couldn’t have just been your imagination, you swore you saw it, you weren’t seeing things, you swore it was there.
You concluded they were glitches. All games have those, right? No coding was bound to work a hundred-percent of the time; this was merely a rare accident. Not gonna lie, though, it thoroughly spooked you.
You ended up watching the pacifist run to calm you down. Nothing like a good, structured timeline to soothe you. As you watched, you could easily tell what was going to be next. You’ve watched this timeline so many times, you could probably retell it in your sleep. You watched as the human woke up in the bed of flowers, making their way through the Ruins.
Oh. They were fighting. Not just defensively, but they were hunting down every single monster they could find. What a shame-- you must have called down the wrong timeline. In this one, everyone dies.
Welp, too late now. You started watching with a grim smile plastered to your face. You’ve watched this one before and by now, you were pretty much indifferent to each timeline. But you still avoid this one, anyways. It brought back unwanted feelings of… something.
You tuned out to most of the timeline. You were more than ready to start watching another one. You started watching again when the demon made it to the Judgement Hall. You smiled amusedly, wondering how many save files the kid was going to have to use to get through you.
You were ready to recite the dialogue with Genocide-timeline Sans when you realized Sans wasn’t there. You waited. Genocide Sans had to show at some point, right? It was in the game’s code. There was no other event that took place in that route.
And then you saw the abomination.
It was Undyne, it looked like Undyne, and you were pretty sure that was Undyne.
But that didn’t matter. Undyne wasn’t supposed to be there.
Undyne was supposed to be dead right now, melting away in Waterfall. You watched in horror as the human striked her down, but for her to get back up, turning into Undyne the Undying.
You, you’re going to have to try harder than that!
This was wrong. This was very, very wrong. For an instant, it reminded you of the error meltdown on your screen files. This was what it must have been. A glitch. A fault in the coding.
And then suddenly every part of this timeline was screaming ERROR and it hurt, it clawed and scratched at your skull, and no you couldn’t take it you couldn’t the pain was unbearable and the glitch was a torment to your sanity, you could feel it corrupting the only order you had in this hell.
It filled you with a fury you couldn’t explain, but all you knew was that you had to stop the glitch from continuing so you did something you’ve never dared do before. With a furious snarl, you lept into the display.
You were in the timeline. You were suspended over the hallway, the marionette strings in your hands once again. You glared down at Undyne, for how dare she screw up the timeline, the filthy, good-for-nothing glitch .
Maybe a small voice in your head urged you to stop, saying she was one of your dearest, closest friends, but really, you didn’t care about that.
You needed a structure. And this Undyne was the glitch that was messing it all up.
And suddenly you were grinning because you realized how fascinating these strings would look all wrapped around her pretty soul.
But before you could conjure up more strings, a bright light filled the room. It blinded you, taking you a couple of seconds for your eyes to readjust, but when it did, you saw them. It was the kid, but they didn’t look normal. They were all gray, their clothes, their hair, their skin, except the dark, black pools they had for eyes.
Sans, is that you? They had said. Oh no… what happened??
You could only stare at them, unable to answer because you weren’t sure what was happening, and you didn’t understand what they were asking. The gray human made it sound like your existence was an accident. They didn’t make sense. You simply… existed. Nothing happened, it’s still you. Right?
What timeline…? Sans. Let me help you.
Timeline. If you were observing all the timelines, then what did that make you? You weren’t part of the definite set of timelines, then didn’t that make you…
Whatever happened… I can help you!
You started chuckling. You couldn’t help it-- everything was just so funny. You pushed the thought away. No more existential crisis, remember? Now was not the time to be questioning yourself. You had a job to do. This kid wasn’t part of the code either. That means they had to go too. You laughed because it was so precious, so ironic.
Kid… you’re VERY BADLY MISTAKEN.
You interrupt their spiel, spreading your hands, letting your string coil around your fingertips.
I’m here… TO HELP YOU.
And at that last word, your strings lashed out towards the two figures. At the same moment, the same bright, blinding light filled the room. When you looked again, your strings were empty and the two glitches were gone.
You stared at the ends of your string in disbelief. And now you were once more bursting with rage and frustration; you sliced through the timeline, entering the nothingness once again to pull up your screen files. You pored over the codes meticulously, catching the added glitches before they disappeared. You clicked on the folder.
It was something called the Omega Timeline. The human (Core!Frisk, they were named) apparently hid useless defects from dead timelines here. As you scrolled through the different files, you came across many names and characters you didn’t even recognize. Everything was wrong. There were different songs to a character, different actions, different text flavor, and there were so many and it annoyed you to no end.
How could you let this many abominations get past you? It was disgusting, it was tainting your perfect structure with its abnormal attributes and you couldn’t just let that kind of filth slip past you.
And what what other monstrosities laid beyond that timeline? They had asked what timeline , meaning there were countless other irregular timelines and universes that didn’t fit your structure.
Boy, what an enlightenment! That certainly filled you with a new sense of purpose. It all made sense; you finally knew what you were put in this hellhole for. The game codes had room for only one universe. Anything other than your set structure was considered an ERROR and must be put out of its misery.
And, well, who’s better to do the job than you?