When the Stars Die

Chapter 8

(Short[er] chapter go brrrr)

Since Betty was kind of like Nightmare's unofficial, undocumented, uncertified adopted daughter or whatever, she had her own share of chores to do.

Which included making breakfast every morning. She'd asked Crescent if it had anything to do with her being a female, but he reassured her that it didn't. The original chef had been Horror, and all of the things he made contained human flesh. It wasn't exactly the most refreshing thing to wake up and eat food that had human flesh, especially when you could hear the screams in the middle of the night. The lingering metallic smell wasn't a good addition either.

As for the others, they were awful cooks. Dust got monster dust in all of the food, and that hallucination of his world's Papyrus kept distracting him, so all of the food was either burnt or undercooked. Killer kept getting liquified HATE in the food, too. And then, for some reason, Nightmare refused to let Cross touch their food.

If he woke up early enough, Crescent would help her with some of the preparations. Neither of them were master cooks, but the others said their food was better than Horror's. Now that the Star Sanses were having breakfast with them, they had to take their tastes into consideration too. Which was a lot harder than they had initially thought.

Blue had an obsession with tacos of any kind and could easily eat them for all three meals of the day. But neither of the two had ever tried making tacos, and according to Dust, Blue wasn't exactly the best chef either. They had no idea what Dream liked. Knowing that he liked sweet things didn't really help, it just helped them avoid most of the meats. Ink was probably the hardest one to figure out.

"InK?" Error had replied when they asked him. "NaH, dOn'T wOrRy AbOuT hIm. He... DoEsN't ExAcTlY.... eAt."

So.... Ink had been scratched off. Though they were both concerned as to what Error meant by that. While the Star Sanses were perfectly capable of getting their own food, it was something to do with being respectful to their guests. Despite literally breaking what he was supposed to do as a king (in which he did like nothing), Nightmare still had a high value on tradition. It kinda annoyed Betty at times, but hey, he saved her from getting absolutely mauled by her world's Gaster. So she could tolerate it.

Betty was also on cleaning duty when breakfast was done. She was just thankful to all the heavens that the Star Sanses weren't complete slobs when they ate, unlike a certain feral beast she lived with. Though cleaning the dishes was arguably easier than cooking all of the food. She would create those pink blob creatures to go and fetch her the dirty dishes.

Now that breakfast was out of the way, they could continue with the important business. They seemed to be more relaxed when they sat at the table today, making small talk with each other until the real meeting started.

Oh yeah, Reaper was there too.

The meeting had been going fairly well. No one had felt any shift in the balance, meaning that Chara hadn't started to reap souls yet. There weren't that many soulless entities in the Multiverse, the most abundant ones being the Floweys and Temmies of the Swap AUs. But they could sense when something was off in their AUs and would be able to hide in time. If one of them was killed, then Ink would be notified.

They believed that Chara didn't know about the secret feature of Reaper's scythe. Ink had adjusted its code so that it would grant Reaper access to the Doodle Sphere after Chara's reaping rampage had taken place. An unfortunate thing was that Ink hadn't added tracking to the codes of the items he granted access through, so he couldn't even look through the modified coding to track it down. He promised them that he would make that adjustment once they got the scythe back, and even wrote it down on his scarf so he wouldn't forget about it.

The next thing they needed to discuss was how they would track Chara down. They could go to Reapertale and threaten its Flowey, but according to Reaper, Life and Mercy (aka Frisk) were already working on that. Ink could check the different AU files, but that would take forever, and finding an anomaly among the codes was harder than they knew. Especially when that anomaly was quick and never stayed in the same place.

If there was one thing Chara sought after, other than the disturbance of natural order and destruction, it was power. If they could gather enough power in a single place, it would become a beacon for her. The only problem with that was deciding where that place would be. Using an AU would put it at some serious jeopardy, and while Ink could repair it without a problem, it would still upset the balance. If they used an "out-coded" world, like the Anti-Void or even where they were now, they were worried that it would be too obvious what they were trying to do.

The meeting had come to a sudden interruption when Ink, Error, Dream, Nightmare, and Reaper-- and Life, from all the way in Reapertale-- let out pained yelps. This had caught everyone else by surprise. They hadn't heard the group yelp like that ever since the Truce was agreed to. Cross was quick to get to Dream's side, nearly knocking Blue over in his hurry.

The second reaping rampage had begun.