songs for the fallen

the tetris effect

Chara
_____ 

Chara has made a terrible, terrible mistake.

It still isn't certain what exactly came over it. Boredom isn't the right word. Neither is frustration, nor annoyance. Curiosity, perhaps? It feels, somehow, that it would be wrong of it to allow Frisk to die before their scheduled capturing. They're of no use if they die here, alone in the wilds of Snowdin Forest. What would some nobody backwoods monster do with their SOUL if they took it? It doesn't know what lies in wait for them in the capital, but whatever it is, it must be worth the drudgery of keeping them alive. Every step they take through the caverns is a step they could use to crush innocents underfoot. Still, they haven't hurt anyone.

Yet.

Chara sighs, returning to a familiar game of mental Tetris as Frisk struggles with another puzzle. They're clearly hungry, and getting grumpier by the second. Listening to Papyrus explain how he messed up his newest puzzle by trying to arrange it in the shape of his face is decidedly not helping. It's a maze of Xs that need to be turned into Os, and doubling back on an already transformed O turns it into a triangle. Frisk keeps messing up and turning back, causing them to have to reset the entire puzzle, and they're getting more and more pissed off. Watching this is honestly just sad.

Chara wanders around as well as it can--it's permanently tethered to their body, their perspective, mostly, but it has a range of about ten feet around them where it can look at things without needing their eyes to do it. There's a switch embedded in a tree to the west of the puzzle, and it figures it's a fifty-fifty toss-up as to whether it blows them into smithereens or solves the puzzle instantaneously. It's holding onto hope that the outcome will be the latter. You notice a switch in the tree, it remarks.

"No backseating, dickwad!" Frisk grumbles under their breath. Begrudgingly, they make their way over to the tree nonetheless. "How'd you see this if you're in my head? Nevermind." They poke at the switch, a loud click sounding from across the puzzle as they do so. There go the spikes. They're one step closer to Snowdin Town, and one step closer to their eventual capture at the hands of none other than the Great Papyrus himself. Wonderful. Chara has taken a liking to that skeleton. He may be terrible at his job, but he tries. That's more than it's been able to say about anyone else down here.

Chara goes back to mental Tetris yet again. Puzzles mean nothing to it, and it doesn't really have anything to say to Frisk. It is, in fact, trying its best not to think about Frisk very much at all. The more it thinks about them, the more it feels a deeply unwelcome gratitude for their companionship. Horrible! They're still human. Nothing will ever, ever change that.

Honestly, Chara doesn't remember enough to know why that thought fills it with so much hatred. The world beyond what little it has recovered of its memory is nebulous and vague. It knows it did, once, have a family, even if it cannot allow itself to consider them its family any longer. It knows it has a reason to want to protect this world. It has never for a moment considered that, in life, it was anything other than a monster. It had to have been a monster. It cannot conceive of itself as anything else.

It must have been a monster. Yes, of course. It won't entertain that nagging doubt even for a second. There's no use thinking about this.

It mentally places a Rhode Island Z, clearing two lines at once. Wonderful. Tetris is so fun and devoid of all existential-crisis-causing memories! Tetris would never hurt it! Tetris would never cause it to question the very fabric of its own existence! Tetris is its truest, most time-honored friend. Its soulmate. Its moirail.

What the hell is a moirail? Why doesn't it remember these things? If it knows the word moirail, it should know what it means! It's losing its mind. Why? Why must it suffer? Why can't it play mental Tetris in peace?