Ace in a Hole (Undertale x Hazbin Hotel)

Chapter 3

Ramen was a go-to meal for Sans, when he didn't want to have to travel on down to town to endure an honest (but long) conversation from sweet and lonely Maurie. The ramen before Sans was stale, with little orange carrot specks sprinkled across the rim. The broth is too salty, and the noodles lacked quality. His punishment for going cheap was something he endured with stale, dry chomps.

Despite that, Sans took another bite and bore down at the computer in front of him. The taste was foul, old, and sloppy, but he forced something down anyways. He was hungry. He hadn't eaten or slept at all that day, too busy with the repercussions of living with a demon.

Alastor. A radio host from the 1930s that worked in this exact building. It wasn't too 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 thought was stupid. Humans seemed to need an enemy—once they cast away the monsters, they had none to turn against but one another. Their own fault, really.

Sans scrolled through the articles on his computer, seeing Alastor's stupid, black and white face grinning back. With colored skin, thin glasses pressed on his perked nose, and an old but well-kept suit. His hair was a sweeping brown, obviously combed neatly despite how fluffy it was. He had this smile on his face, Sans knew, probably carried into the afterlife, if he did somehow have a physical body. Fuck if Sans knew, he never died before.

As far as he was aware, at least.

Another bite of ramen had Sans sputtering, pressing a hand against his mouth as he chewed. Sans could eat a lot of gross shit, but even that was crossing the line. A crunch of slightly overcooked noodles was all it took before he stood up, his wooden dining room chair dragged across the tiled floor, and he dumped the remaining noodles into the trash. Whatever happened to the noodles after they cooked was actually atrocious. A war crime, Sans preferred to think. If even the legendary Comic Sans himself, the man that once chugged expired milk in high school just to win five bucks, couldn't eat it, it was clearly inedible across the board.

Sans didn't even keep the flavor packet, tossing it into the trash as he takes a bite out of the raw block of noodles. Its brittle, crunchy, and flavorless experience was somehow more tolerable than the cooked noodles sitting at the bottom of his trash. Good enough.

It'd 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 hummed and buzzed a decent distance away from Sans' home as the sun wavered 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. Because while they had plenty of articles about demons or the undead, there was an overabundance of conflicting articles that made Sans' head spin. All he wanted to do was rid himself of a radio-haunting demon, not risk him becoming a permanent fixture. So many posts said direct opposite things of 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.