The Time Before (Undertale)

12 ~ Into the World (beyond the lab, this time.)

Sans honestly wasn't sure how they had gotten the huge vat of lava into the blast room, nor what metal the vat was made of that it wasn't melting. But that wasn't important.

What was important was that it was there, and they were using it to test the first CORE prototype that had been made with runes.

It had been ten months since Sans had first been allowed to the upper floors of the lab and had first suggested the runes. In that time, a lot had happened.

Sans was rather well-known throughout the lab by then. After the first week, Gaster gave him permission to go to any floor, so long as he didn't actually leave the lab. In the following ten months, he explored the True Lab in its entirety, learning the location of everything, and the employees that worked there. He made an effort to befriend everyone. These were, after all, the monsters he was created to save. He wanted to know them well.

Thinking along those lines, he put all the more effort into strengthening his Magic. The now nearly-monthly Determination injections helped, too, making him work all the harder for it. By the end of ten months, he could almost beat Gaster in a fight. Granted, his Blue Magic still needed a lot of work- he hadn't hardly progressed in that at all- but Gaster assured him that he would get there.

And most of his time not spent talking to monsters, practicing his Magic, or something to do with the DTW injections, he was working with Gaster on the CORE.

And now, finally, they were testing the rune CORE prototype.

As this was a completely new, possibly advanced idea, Gaster had insisted that the testing be as close to the real thing as possible. Hence the huge vat of magma sitting in the middle of the blast room, with the ten foot tall CORE prototype sitting in the middle of that. There were a variety of cables running off the prototype, each to a circuit board that would measure the energy output.

Sans and the rest of the design crew were in the adjacent room, watching through a reinforced glass window. Gaster, though, was in the middle of the blast room, checking over the prototype again. He would also have to start it from there, as the runes required some Magic to be fed into them before they could start producing Magic. This was, of course, extremely dangerous. If the prototype blew up, then Gaster could be seriously injured or even killed.

Nonetheless, he had insisted on doing it. And, as he was the Royal Scientist, no one dared contradict him.

So, it was with a tense carefulness that Gaster touched his fingertips to the prototype, hand glowing with flickers of Magic. Half a second later, he turned and ran, slipping out the door and slamming it shut behind him. Only a moment later, he was joining the rest in the observation room.

"Well?" He asked.

"Nothing yet." Jeff responded.

And they watched. And waited.

After a couple seconds, a soft humming sound filled the room. Gaster checked the device in his hand, the one connected to the circuit board connected to the CORE prototype.

And then he let out a whistle. "It's nearly four hundred units-"

There was a bang, and the room shook, it's occupants dropping to the floor as the prototype blew up.

As the trembling stopped and everyone stood to peer through the window at the flaming wreckage of the prototype, Gaster laughed. "That's the closest we've been to getting this thing working since the beginning of the project! Come on, I think I have an idea as to what happened, and how to fix it next time..."

~o0o~

Another two months came and went, with four more rune-prototypes built to varying degrees of success. All of them, however, worked at least for a minute or two before exploding, and that was more progress than had been made almost twenty five years.