Ace in a Hole: Collaborative Shenenigans

Chapter 3

Ramen is a go-to meal for Sans, when he doesn't want to have to travel down to town or endure an honest but long-winded conversation with sweet and lonely Marrie. The ramen in question before Sans is stale, with little orange carrot specs sprinkled across the rim. The broth is salty, too salty, since this brand was shit. What he gets for going cheap, he guesses.

Despite that, Sans takes another bite and stares at the computer in front of him. The taste is foul, old, and sloppy, but something he forces down anyway. He's hungry. He hasn't eaten or slept at all that day, too busy dealing with the repercussions of living with a demon.

Alastor. A radio host from the 1930's that worked in this exact building. Wasn't really difficult to find him on the Internet. Alastor Augustin. The first mixed man to host a radio show entirely independently in the state. And, discovered a few days after his death, the local serial killer with one of the highest body counts in the state, triumphed by a killer in the 1970s who had two more. The reveal of the man's 'extracurricular activities' had been enough for the entire radio station to tank and the building abandoned when the local community sparked debate about letting anyone mixed onto the air. Which Sans thinks is stupid. Humans seriously couldn't be nice to their own kind after monsters left? Banishing them Underground was stupid enough, and then turning on their own people was downright idiotic.

Sans scrolls through the articles on his computer, seeing Alastor's stupid, black-and-white face grinning back as he shakes hands with the radio host. With skin that was tan, these glasses pressed on his perked nose, and an old but very clearly kept suit. His hair was a sweeping brown, obviously combed neatly despite how fluffy it was. He's got this smile on his face Sans knows probably carried into the afterlife if he did somehow have a physical body. Fuck if Sans knew; he's never died before.

Another bite of ramen has Sans sputtering, pressing a hand against his mouth as he chews. What the hell did these people do to this? Sans can eat a lot of gross shit, but even this was crossing the line. A crunch of slightly overcooked noodles is all it takes before he stands up, his wooden dining room chair dragging across the tiled floor, and he dumps the remaining into the trash before he grabs a new package. Whatever happened to the noodles after they cooked was atrocious. A war crime, Sans wants to think. If even the legendary Comic Sans himself, a man who once chugged expired milk in high school just to win five bucks, couldn't eat it, it's committing war crimes.

Sans doesn't even keep the flavor packet, tossing it into the trash as he takes a bit out of the raw block of noodles. It's brittle, crunchy, and flavorless, but somehow more tolerable than the cooked noodles now sitting at the bottom of his trash. Eh. Good enough.

It's been about five hours since he met the legendary Alastor Augustin for a second time with a bucket of old, green slime he bought as an impulse purchase at the local toy store. Outside, mosquitoes hum and buzz a decent distance away from Sans' home as the sun wavers behind the horizon.

Research had come in handy when it came to figuring out how exactly to deal with this fucker. As stupid as humans were at times, their paranoia and curiosity came in handy. While monsters never really explored the possibility of undead people or demons Underground, humans flourished with those ideas on the surface. Maybe it was a cultural difference that led to this overabundance in humans and a lack of curiosity in monsters, but where monsters lacked in the spiritual compartment, humans flourished.

Which came with a degree of annoyance. While they had plenty of articles about demons or undead, there was an overabundance of conflicting articles that made Sans' head spin when he tried to figure out how to rid himself of the stupid radio voice that caused those bloody handprints to form. So many posts saying direct opposite things to one another. The problem with dealing with the undead was that, ironically enough in Sans' case, while so many humans believed in it, they all believed in different versions of it. None quite the same. Sans didn't believe in an afterlife until about twenty-four hours ago, so he was in over his head.