Reckoning Tale-An Undertale Fanfiction Novel

Chapter 85: A Time And Place

Original Dimension

Please work. Please work. Gaster couldn’t communicate directly into the other dimensions yet, and what he was doing was highly experimental. But, he knew two things. If it didn’t work right, Alphys would be glad to give up her life for it because her life memories weren’t easy. And, if it did work, he didn’t want her dreading what he tried to do.

Someone had to go first. Souls were like snowflakes, and Sans machine could find the missing pieces around there, while taking some of the pod apart, enabled him to break into the souls of the other dimensions. They gravitated to it like snow once he gave them the coordinates of the target soul in Fun Level 74

He heard a scream from beside Sans’ machine as Alphys materialized in front of it. He gave her time to roll around and let her body adjust to the onslaught that would invade her mind. After the initial torture of remembering, he tried to communicate something soft to her. “You are whole, Alphys. I don’t know which memories you will keep, so uh, try and keep your best memories if you can?” He gave her a little while with that advice. Slow but steady.

Eventually, she spoke. “I watched myself.”

Watched herself? “Watched yourself what?”

Alphys was fighting off the Underground with her own power that took off no hits. It wasn’t possible to win. It was just a slow, meaningless death. She felt the helplessness, and the avoidance of another self-watching her too. A duplicate, what she thought was a parallel self, wanting to find a new world. Alphys wanted to know more, so she sheltered her. Helped her, until a monster went missing in the Underground.

Because there were no other suspects who would go after the monster, and Alphys had no real alibi, she was done for. Done for. Even the other her had received a very strict warning that she'd be next if anything else happened. Alphys covered her face with her paws, noticing for the first time how strange the environment felt. She laced her hand in earth that had no moisture, it just felt like lifeless, cold dirt.

“Alphys?” Gaster’s voice. “Are you okay?”

Alphys picked herself up off the earth. “Yes.”

“Good.” He patted her on the back. “You never have to go through it again. We never have to go through this again.”

Then, she remembered. It had been there the whole time, on the tip of her mind. “Frisk.”

“Yes.”

"She was near Cora.”

“Yes, she had been.”

“I was responsible for murdering her whole family.” Frisk had no idea about that.

"I believe she more than anyone else will understand the helplessness of power out of control," Gaster said. “You have your original memories, good. Some older memories. What else do you remember?”

"A human. A woman.”

“A human woman, Underground?”

“I gave her a sweater. I didn't know who she was, but she’s down there. Fighting,” Alphys said. "Fighting pointlessly. There’s not a single monster that will help. I left a sweater, with a camera. Not to help, just to make sure she wasn’t going to . . . because there was another human . . . it destroyed everything. I talked to Sans, left and then . . . here.”

“That other,” Gaster said, “and the woman fighting now.” He closed his eyelids. “Was Frisk. Is Frisk. Something was done to her mind, and she is also joined with another soul. You remember Fun level 5.”