Sands stared at the door, examining it carefully from top to bottom, as if in hindsight he realized it hid something he didn't know. He examined the delta rune, the symbol of prophecy, carved into the door, the doorframe, the hewn stone pillars, the delicate carving of the delta rune to match the door. It didn't make any difference. A door was a door, shut tight. A door that showed no sign that anyone had ever left the ruins.
It was strange. No humans had come out, even after eight or nine times when they should have. But Sands had prepared himself for dealing with humans. Perfectly, almost to the point of overkill.
There was a reason for this, of course. There had been times when he hadn't killed the monsters he needed to kill and waited for the humans to come. He'd gotten so excited about fighting humans that he'd gotten reckless. Sands wondered how much a human with whom he had developed enough LOVE could entertain him and how well he could fight against them. It was a reckless endeavor, as mentioned earlier, and in that timeline, Sands was nearly killed once more by a human. If he hadn't killed Papyrus, he would have surely died, as he didn't want to give the humans any of his EXP. Poor Papyrus, even in death, he got his brother. After being teleported back from the brink of death, Sands pulled himself together and killed the monsters in his neighborhood to earn LOVE and reverse the timeline, but from then on, he was neither careless nor arrogant, obsessively hunting down and killing every monster in every nook and cranny before he welcomed humans into his life. No matter how insane he was, he didn't want to trade his fun and his life-plus the fate of the underground that he carried with him, albeit with some neglect. Thankfully, there were only living monsters down there now.
Sands, the last survivor, spoke to the vision that followed him.
"Papyrus, no humans are coming out, what should we do?"
Papyrus's apparition replied gruffly.
"Well, I'm not the only one with a pointy tail, am I, brother?
Sands stroked my jawbone. I don't know what to do with this.
There was no set time for humans to emerge from the ruins, not for Sands, not for humans, not for anything that wasn't stationary underground. Of course, there were specimens that piled up and piled up like a cumulative time line, like a stacked timeline, and somewhere underground, you'd come to the front of the ruins, thinking it was time to get out, and the door would always be open. But has it ever taken this long? No.
"If they don't come out, we'll have to go in."
He said he wouldn't go in there.
"I don't think they'll come out if we just wait. It's taking too long."
The Ruins were human territory. Though unilaterally created by Sands, it was an unwritten rule between the two that they would not enter the Ruins. For Sands, entering the Ruins immediately after the reset was a lot to take in.
Entering the ruins through a legitimate gate meant confronting Toriel, ambushing him meant breaking down the gate would be caught on the cameras that monitor the ruins, and breaking the cameras would alert Alfis, who would then send guards rushing over to find out what had happened. After a few hassles in the ruins, Sands had safely moved on to dealing with the snow underground, leaving the ruins untouched, leaving them in human hands.
Sands shrugged.
"It'll be fine now that we've gotten rid of anyone who's going to bother us. Let's go, and maybe we can get some pie."
Sands pushed open the ruined door, which hadn't been opened in a long time, and it made an unpleasant noise. The cold winds of Snowdyne, blowing across the hot earth, rushed in, sending the dust that had accumulated beyond the door flying and scattering down the long crypt corridor. It was more than the dust of any other monster. On the floor lay a large purple robe with a delta rune on it. It was Toriel's. Sands looked down at it. The papyrus vision squinted at the garment.
