The Time Before (Undertale)

44 ~ Backdoor

Another day passed, and Gaster was back on his feet. Sans and Papyrus wouldn't let him out of the house, however, until the day after.

Gaster was happy to return to the lab. Sans had gotten wind that Gaster had started a new experiment with Determination, and injecting it into inanimate objects. Sans, however, was content to not be a part of any experiments involving DT, and didn't even ask Gaster about it. He figured he would just keep an eye on Gaster's Lv, and intervene if things got bad.

While the Spacefold project had produced some interesting results, such as the ability to fold space, it had been a flop in terms of its goal, and the team was disbanded.

Sans still came into the lab every so often to poke around at the projects there, but he actually went back to his job as a comedian at the fancy hotel restaurant. He was going to pick up the hotdog business again, but he found that, as he had stopped using the small stall, his business had actually been shut down by some Royal Guardsman or other who had finally taken it upon themself to stop the illegal stand.

Sans considered opening a new h'dog stand in Hotland, maybe. Or Waterfall.

But, for now his time was split comfortably between the lab, home with his family, and working the comedy gig. All in all, things were pretty good.

Then one day, when he was working on something in the lab with Jeff and Alphys (who still called him "Dr. Sans"), Gaster burst into the room, shouting for them to follow him.

They did so.

Eventually, he had rounded up all of the former Spacefold team members and led them back to the formerly Spacefold-dedicated lab.

Once they had all gathered around the central table, Gaster leaned forward, hands on the table, grinning. "I've figured it out."

"Oh no." Jeff said.

"We're not just going to fold space."

"Oh no."

"We're also going to fold time."

"... What."

Gaster grinned at the cat monster. "We've already proved that we can fold the plane of space. So we just do the same thing with the plane of time, and go back to when and where the Barrier was first created."

"what, and just stop it form ever being made?"

"No." Gaster looked at Sans. "No, because then there's the possability of creating a time paradox where we go back to stop the Barrier from being made, but then the Barrier isn't there, so we don't go back to stop it, thus it's there, so we do go back to stop it, and so on. No one likes it when that happens."

"That implies that it's already happened." Jeff crossed his arms.

Gaster glared at him. "Maybe it has, and we just don't know it."

"Or," Jeff raised one eyebrow, "it hasn't, because no one is stupid enough to mess with time in the first place."

Gaster made a rude noise, and waved off Jeff's argument. "Regardless, we don't want to create a time paradox. So we can't just go back and stop the Barrier from being created. Instead, we go back and... modify it. We include some kind of backdoor in the original spell, one we know we couldn't find in any of the research we've done on the Barrier leading up to now so it doesn't create another paradox, then come back to our time and open the backdoor and let monsters go free."