The Time Before (Undertale)

2 ~ Not a Child!

The first time S642 used its voice was nearly three months after it first opened its eyes.

S642's Soul had grown to the point where it nearly exactly matched an infant monster's. S642 had also grown physically, gaining an entire foot in height. Gaster mainly attributed this to the growth serum he had been feeding it.

It still didn't like the taste, but Gaster's wide and friendly smiles encouraged it to drink the solution daily.

This particular day had been an irritating day for Gaster. A wide variety of things had gone wrong, from a batch of experimental snails dying to another CORE prototype blowing up. The day had ended in Gaster removing three lab employees from the building, one of them through force. They wouldn't be coming back.

He was looking forward to a quiet evening, working on his project. With the way things were going, he should have been able to start conditioning S642 for the DTW project in a few more weeks.

When he came into his lab and opened the door to the small bedroom, though, he saw S642 wasn't on the bed.

That in itself was new.

Since opening its eyes, S642's intelligence had only grown. It had quickly learned, after figuring out how to crawl, that the bed was rather high up, and it should stay away from the edges of the mattress, lest it fall. Again. So, it had voluntarily kept to the top of the bed, always waiting for Gaster to arrive to go anywhere.

But today, S642 wasn't on the mattress, smiling at Gaster as it normally did.

Standing in the door, Gaster glanced around the room. He didn't see it anywhere. It was impossible, he knew, that S642 had escaped the room. The door had still been locked when he came in. So it had to still be in the room.

He stepped into the room, and pulled the door closed behind him. Then he knelt down, and started looking under the furniture.

The small living quarters was sparsely furnished, as it was only meant to be slept in, and not very often at that. There was the bed, and a nightstand with an alarm clock and a lamp on top of it. Against one wall was a small wardrobe, with some of Gaster's spare clothes inside.

S642 wasn't under the wardrobe, nor inside it. The nightstand was far too small to fit S642 under it. So that left the bed.

Gaster set one hand against the bedframe and peered under it. It was too dark to see, though. Sighing, Gaster closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were lit with the light purple of his Magic, casting a faint glow under the bed.

And curled up there under the bed, amid the dust motes and shadows, was S642.

Gaster sighed again. Reaching out with one of his telekinetic, Magic hands, he pulled S642 out from under the bed. It squirmed a bit in his grip, then grinned at him as he picked it up with his physical hands, holding it at arm's length.

It was covered in dust.

Gaster closed his eyes, scowling. This meant he would have to clean it up, which would mean taking it out of his own lab, as it no longer fit conveniently in the sink in his lab.

But, he could not just leave it all dirty. That was unthinkable; he might sometimes make a mess in his work, but he did not leave his work messy.