Summary: The human is arriving in Snowdin, covered in dust. Papyrus goes to face them, and this time...
This time.
This time.
Papyrus padded through the deserted town. Sans had gone who knows where, but his brother had an uncanny ability to appear wherever he needed to be, so Papyrus wasn’t worried. Sans could take care of himself. He had before.
Still, he was concerned. They hadn't hid from him. They hadn't responded to sans's terribly funny puns. They hadn't played the puzzles! Walked through them as if they were nothing. And those horribly cold eyes...
Papyrus was snapped from his thoughts by a bump against his legs. He looked down to see the Innkeeper and her daughter. The girl was trembling. He smiled at her, and directed them to the nearest evacuation route. He saw Sans at the entrance, beckoning them in. Sans, always where he needed to be. Papyrus took a deep breath and went on. This time.
As he passed the eastern edge of town, he stationed himself to meet the human. Excitement and dread battled for dominance in his soul. This time…The air grew colder and quieter until, three and a half minutes later, the fog rolled in like clockwork. A shadow formed in the distance.
He hoped sans was safe. He hoped the Innkeeper and her daughter were safe.
He hoped the human could be saved.
Papyrus took a deep breath.
“HALT, HUMAN!”
They moved forward a step. Like clockwork. Papyrus felt a cold sweat break out on the top of his skull.
“HEY, QUIT MOVING WHILE I’M TALKING TO YOU! I, THE GREAT PAPYRUS, HAVE SOME THINGS TO SAY.” The human looked back at him with cold eyes, but did not respond. “FIRST: YOU’RE A FREAKING WEIRDO! NOT ONLY DO YOU NOT LIKE PUZZLES. BUT THE WAY YOU SHAMBLE ABOUT FROM PLACE TO PLACE…THE WAY YOUR HANDS ARE ALWAYS COVERED IN DUSTY POWDER.” He glanced down, but there was really no need. Even from a distance he could see the dust glinting in the low light, sparkling gaily as if it were only powdered crystal. His hand shook, but he stopped it as best he could. He could almost hear sans in his head, telling him to run or to fight, but…this time…
“IT FEELS…LIKE YOUR LIFE IS GOING DOWN A DANGEROUS PATH.”
The human’s hands clenched, as if they were…ashamed? Papyrus’s soul did a great leap in triumph. This time…
“HOWEVER! I, PAPYRUS, SEE GREAT POTENTIAL WITHIN YOU! EVERYONE CAN BE A GREAT PERSON IF THEY TRY! AND ME, I HARDLY HAVE TO TRY AT ALL!!!” He laughed. They would laugh with him, they would—
“HEY, QUIT MOVING!” The human stopped in their tracks, but not after they had closed the distance considerably. They put a hand in their pocket. Papyrus fought the urge to hold them, to shake some sense into them.
“THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I AM TALKING ABOUT! HUMAN! I THINK YOU ARE IN NEED OF GUIDANCE!” If his words were affecting them at all, they didn’t show it. But Papyrus saw the light behind their eyes. They were in there. They hadn't even skipped his words like last time.
“SOMEONE NEEDS TO KEEP YOU ON THE STRAIGHT AND NARROW! BUT WORRY NOT! I, PAPYRUS…WILL GLADLY BE YOUR FRIEND AND TUTOR! I WILL TURN YOUR LIFE RIGHT AROUND!!!” He smiled at them, a picture of Sans and himself holding the human in their arms, together and happy, forming in his mind. He thought they may have remembered the same thing, for he saw some recognition flash behind their eyes. Papyrus didn’t take his eyes from theirs as they advanced again towards him. He stayed exactly where he was.
“I SEE YOU ARE APPROACHING.”
This time. This time, they would listen.
“ARE YOU OFFERING A HUG OF ACCEPTANCE?”
This time. This time, they would change.
“WOWIE!! MY LESSONS ARE ALREADY WORKING!!”
This time. Once again, he knelt and held out his arms.
Summary: Sans has his fight with Chara put on hold. *Genocide run
DAY 1
Sans stared down at the human. They were crumpled before him; prone, broken. He heard a familiar hiss as the Gaster Blaster by his side faded into nothing. He watched the human’s soul shatter, red bits flying everywhere, and Sans felt sickened with himself. Not because he’d killed them—no, they’d lost any sympathy they might’ve gotten from him a long time ago. No, he was sickened because a part of him hated being the one who had to do it, who had to be the last line of defense. He pulled at the top of his spine. Now maybe he’d get some rest—
Sans felt a tear, then a sort of jolting movement somewhere behind his left eye. It was happening. He could almost see the last five minutes be re-routed, passed over.
He found himself staring down the golden hallway. The human was there again, at their Save point. They started toward him, and he couldn’t hold back a grimace. Here we go again.
DAY 2
Twelve times. Twelve times the human had tried. They got further and further every time, had to eat less and less often. But there they were, their battered body lying on the ground in front of him, and Sans couldn’t help but give a sigh of relief. Not this time, human.
He braced for the Reset he knew would be coming. Although his body lost its weariness with each Reset, he could not say the same for his mind. His anger, his frustration, his despair stayed the same, if not increased. He’d seen what could happen. He knew. But he’d be damned if he let them get their ending that easily.
Sans looked down at the human again. They were taking a while this time around, weren’t they?
DAY 3
Sans was sitting against a pillar, spinning a small bone in his hand. He glanced over at the human. They still hadn’t moved from their prone position on the floor from the day before, after their twelfth try. Bits of their soul were still scattered around them like shards of red glass, shining with the golden glow of the hall.
Sans clenched his hand and the bone disappeared. What was taking them so long?
DAY 5
He wanted to investigate the Save point, to see if there was something wrong with it.
Sans gave the body a wide berth. He walked up right next to the windows, but it was still haunting being that close to the human. It seemed like a sort of sinister air still hung around them. Maybe it was the monster dust mingled in with their own blood, glinting in the light like diamond powder. Sans supposed he could have just teleported. He had gotten better at it, but even so, he couldn’t risk accidentally transporting himself to someplace far from here, not when he was the only one left to protect Asgore.
Sans finally cleared the body and continued down the hallway. He could feel the human’s Save point at the end of the hall. It was like an anchor, a pin in the most fragile of fabrics. Any point after that could be torn and torn and torn again, but that spot would always stay firm. Sans closed his right eye, and suddenly he could see it. The Save was like a bright star, twinkling and shining. To a human, it probably looked like a life vest.
To Sans, it looked like a gravestone.
DAY 8
The human still hadn’t moved.
Sans was starting to wonder if he’d been left behind, if he was part of an abandoned timeline, doomed to haunt this room alone, too afraid to leave just in case the human ever did come back. But how could he know if the human had done a True Reset, had just jumped to another timeline?
No, that couldn’t be true. Could it?
He thought back. No, it was there, another timeline. A timeline where the human had been his friend. He clawed at his skull. It was so painful to remember, Sans sometimes wondered if he hadn’t just dreamed it. But he’d felt it then, the True Reset. He’d felt the tearing, the jolt, and the next thing he knew, he’d woken up in his home in Snowdin. Underground.
No, he’d know if there was a Reset. If he could remember one as awful as that one, he could remember any of them.
He glanced at the body again. How long would it be?
DAY 12
The sound was like thunder over his head as the Gaster Blaster fired. The glass shattered, the Delta Rune destroyed. Sans stared at the destruction he’d made. He decided not to worry about it. It’d get Reset anyway.
DAY 15
He’d destroyed all of the windows now.
DAY 20
He wanted so badly to go to Grillby’s and forget about all of this.
DAY 21
Then he remembered there was no one at Grillby’s.
DAY 22
He took Papyrus’s scarf out from his pocket. He hadn’t looked at it since Pap died. It had hurt too much. But now Sans felt like he needed his brother more than ever. The silence was just too much.
DAY 30
The Underground isn’t a big place, but it felt bigger when there were the hum of other souls, the ringing of echo flowers, the vibrations of hundreds of monsters walking from here to there and back again.
Now, though, the Underground felt like what it was: a shallow, small, claustrophobic cavern. It was silent, empty. Sans imagined he could hear all the way to the Ruins if he wanted to.
And the Underground will go empty, the prophecy said.
Summary: A kindergarten classroom in Glass Shard Beach, New Jersey, circa 196?.
Stanford set his hand against the construction paper and took out his brown marker. Stanley, who was sitting next to him, had already drawn a rather shoddy drawing of a sailboat in the top corner.
“Okay, class,” the teacher, Mrs. Feldman, was saying, “make sure you keep your hand very still on the paper, or it won’t turn out right. Take your brown markers and trace around your handprints.”
Stanley grabbed a blue marker and slammed his hand down on the paper.
“Stan, turkeys are brown, not blue,” Stanford admonished, beginning to trace around his splayed hand very carefully.
“Well all the awesome turkeys are blue!” Stanley exclaimed, and began to trace his own hand, pressing down on the marker so hard it began to smash and dyed the edges of his hand.
“Would you want to eat a blue turkey?” Stanford asked as he finished his tracing.
“Yeah I would! That would be awesome!”
“Alright class, when you’ve finished, you can lift your hands from the paper. Your thumb will be the neck and head of your turkey, and your fingers are the feathers. Have fun decorating your turkeys however you like!”
The twins each lifted their hands in tandem. Stanley grinned at his drawing, the thick blue lines still shining from the drying ink. He turned to his brother, expecting to see the same smile looking back at him. Instead, Stanford was wearing a frown.
“What’s up, bro-bro?” Stanley took up a red marker and began to draw hot-rod flames on his turkey.
“My turkey came out wrong,” Stanford replied. Stanley stopped mid-flame and frowned at his brother’s handprint.
“How? I don’t see anything weird with it.”
“But it’s wrong,” Stanford insisted. He stared at his hand. The edges had still been dyed a faint brown, despite his best intentions.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Stanley huffed. Stanford didn’t reply, so Stanley decided that his verdict of normalcy had been enough and went back to his hot-rod flames. He was totally immersed in the craft, tongue sticking out in concentration, when Stanford mumbled something so low that Stanley wasn’t even sure he’d heard it.
“My turkey came out wrong because I’m wrong.”
Stanley’s marker froze in place and he turned to his brother. He was just as Stanley had left him before, staring at his hand, but now there were fat tears in Stanford’s eyes. They hadn’t yet fallen, and Stanley wasn’t even sure his brother knew they were there. Stanley glanced back and forth between Stanford and his outstretched hand, trying to figure out what was making him so upset.
“What are you talking about, Ford?” Stanley asked cautiously. The red ink of his marker began to make a bleeding red dot at the end of one of his flames.
“Mine isn’t like everyone else’s. Everyone else has four feathers!” Stanford said around the lump in his throat. He was barely keeping in the tears now, and he was trembling. “I have five! Five feathers! It’s supposed to be four.”
“So? That just means your turkey is better than everyone else’s,” Stanley stated matter-of-factly. “The more feathers there are, the more awesomer the turkey is.”
Stanford stared at him, astonished. A thought came to Stanley and he beamed.
“Hey, that means you have the best turkey in the world!” he exclaimed.
A cautious smile broke out on Stanford’s face. He looked at his hand, and then at the other drawings around him. He broke out into a wide grin, and the fat tears were banished from his eyes.
“Well, you have the best looking turkey in the world,” Stanford beamed.
“Darn tootin’!” He threw his hands in the air and cheered, and Stanford joined him. A few kids laughed around them, but they were all too absorbed in their projects to pay attention.
“Yes! Best turkeys in the world!” he crowed.
“Best brothers in the world!” Stanford echoed. He held up his marker-stained hand. “High five!”
“No, best brothers in the world get the best high-five in the world: a high-six,” Stanley replied, and clapped hands with his brother.
So I’m writing a story for Over the Garden Wall, and it’s gotten a little out of hand (about 35 pages out of hand to be exact). I haven’t written anything this long in years, and I’m unsure about it.
SO
I was hoping I could get some feedback from you guyze! If you’re interested, message me and I can send you the first chapter, and you can read it and tell me what you think (and if you like it maybe I can lend you some of the other chapters as well).
Mabel hammered another nail in yet another tree, and hung the sign haphazardly from it. This way to the Mystery Shack! it said in bright red letters. She grumbled as she picked up the stack of wooden signs, moving to another tree only feet away.
“Soos even offered! And yet I’m the one out here in this creepy forest,” she muttered to the universe. “It’s not fair.”
Don’t complain. I actually think this is kind of cool.
Mabel looked up at the sky. Polaris was just starting to shine.
She smiled. Yeah, you would, she thought.
She placed the next nail, but when the hammer fell the tree gave off a hollow metallic sound, like a large bell ringing.
“What the—“ she started, and hit the tree again. It made the same noise, and there seemed to be a collection of dust on the trunk. She brushed it away, feeling the slightest hairline crack in the metal.
Open it! Open it!
She pulled back the sheet of metal, revealing that the tree was in fact hollow, but that wasn’t all. There was some sort of device inside, covered in dust and cobwebs. It looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. What is this, Star Trek? she thought to herself. She pressed a button on the machine, but it wouldn’t give. She was fiddling with the switches when suddenly she heard something moving behind her. She whirled around, where there was a square hole in the ground that hadn’t been there before. She slowly approached it, ready to run at the slightest sign of trouble. But as she looked inside, all she saw was an extremely dusty book.
Cool cool cool cool! Pick it up!
Her fingers slid a little against the dust as she picked up the book. She swiped off the front, revealing a six-fingered golden hand with a painted number three.
What’s inside?
“Would you give me a minute?” she said, sitting down. She opened the cover.
“’Property of…’” she muttered, but the page was too torn to see who the book actually belonged to. She turned to the next page.
“June 18th,” she read, “It’s hard to believe it’s been six years since I began researching the strange and wondrous secrets of Gravity Falls, Oregon.” She flipped through the journal, finding pages upon pages of drawings, charts, and notes.
Normally she wouldn’t be interested in this sort of thing, but she knew he would. She held her wrist, running her thumb over the place where, every day, she drew the mark. When she was old enough she’d get a tattoo, but for now this would have to do. She felt a gut instinct to keep this book, so she took it and ran back to the Shack.
The sun was fully beyond the horizon before she reached the front door of the Shack. She turned the doorknob and found her Grunkle Stan sitting in the armchair, watching TV.
“Hey, sweetie! I was just about to send a hunting party to get you,” he said, not looking away from the screen. “What took you so long?”
Mabel opened her mouth, but something stopped her.
“It just took longer than I expected to get all the signs up,” she replied, which was not technically a lie. She hadn’t expected for a mysterious trapdoor to take up her time. She took the steps two at a time and entered the attic. Two twin beds sat on opposite ends of the room. Mabel took the right one, as she always did. She left the other side untouched.
“I’ll deal with you later,” she said to the journal, putting it under her pillow. She pulled on her pajamas took her hair out of its usual braid.
“Goodnight, Grunkle Stan!” she yelled downstairs.
“Goodnight, kid!” he yelled back up to her. She smiled and closed the door, crossing over to the other bed to fluff the pillow before crawling into her own bed to go to sleep.
Mabel woke in a cold sweat. Her heart was beating in her chest at about a million miles per hour, and she had kicked off all of her sheets. She lay there for a moment, trying just to breathe and let the moment pass. She tried not to think of the silence, the cold eyes, the bloody hands. She tried to close her eyes, but it just made it worse. She sat up and picked her sheets up off of the ground, bunching them up. She held them against the pit in her stomach that was forming as she stared at the twin bed across from her. The full moon slanted across the empty sheets, the vacant wall behind it.
Soon she couldn’t take it anymore. She crossed to the other bed, dragging her sheets along after her. She fell against the bed, curling herself into the smallest ball she possibly could make. She pulled the sheets around her and cried herself to sleep.
The next day had Mabel and Soos cleaning out one of the many unused closets around the Shack. This one seemed to have a bunch of costumes and decorations in it (“From back in my theatre days,” Stan had said). Mabel, of course, spent more time trying on the gaudy hats and jewelry than actually cleaning, but Soos didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he was encouraging her to try on as many as possible before they threw it all away.
“You should give this to Goodwill, Grunkle Stan!” Mabel called. He was hanging out in the living room, as per usual.
“What would they want with a bunch of cowboy hats and pants that have way too many tassels?” he yelled back.
“The world always needs more costumes!” Mabel shouted, flinging a hot pink feather boa around Soos’s neck. He laughed, throwing a small purse into a black trash bag. Mabel caught the glint of a silver chain peeking out from under a firefighter suit.
“Whoa, what’s this?” she said, pulling it out. Attached to the long chain was a gleaming silver locket. She opened it to discover a large green gem inside. “Hey, it’s my birthstone!” she said delightedly, pulling the chain over her head.
“That’s actually really nice,” Soos said. “Maybe Mr. Pines’ll let you keep it.”
“Hey, Grunkle Stan!” she yelled.
“Yeah!”
“Can I keep one of the things in here?”
“Yeah, sure. Whatever floats your boat, kid!”
She packed the rest of the stuff in bags and carried it out to Soos’s car. She got a promise from him that he would take all of the stuff to Goodwill before he drove away. She palmed the locket, and thought of the journal she found the day before. She ran upstairs, took it, and went out into the forest.
She really had no idea where she was going, but just kept putting one foot in front of the other. The trees passed by around her, and various critters chittered from the dappled shadows.
She took the necklace off again to look at it. The front was covered in an elaborate engraving of a forest of pines, a river winding through them. This is really beautiful for a costume piece, she thought. She flipped it over, surprised to find more engraving on the back.
“Reddantur deperditi…” she read.
Whoa, it’s like some ancient secret language or something!
She held her wrist up beside the lettering. She kept a sharpie by her bedside so she could draw her reminder when she woke up. She’d done this every morning since her parents had told her. They didn’t stop her, despite her mom’s fussing about the dangers of ink poisoning. They knew she had to do this.
“Reddantur deperditi,” she said again, rolling the unfamiliar words around in her mouth. “Reddantur deperditi…”
She looked up and jumped. There was a boy standing by the tree in front of her. He looked to be about her age, wearing a blue shirt and navy shorts. His brown hair fell over his forehead, and his brown eyes seemed to catch more light than was physically possible. At first she thought he was a trick of the light, but the more she looked at him, the more she realized that this boy was real.
Hi.
She gasped and drew back, dropping the pendant. She blinked, and the boy was gone.
“Hello?” she called into the forest, but nothing responded. She suddenly felt very alone. “Hellooooo?” she called again, and when nothing answered, she picked up the pendant again by its chain.
“What the hey-hey are you?” she muttered to the locket, opening it again. It only gleamed at her in response. She ran home into the gift shop, which was closed for the day. She hid behind the mummified mermaid aquarium and opened the journal.
“The Undead, Gnomes, Leprecorn…” She flipped through all of the pages, but no mention of a pine tree locket. But it has to be magical, right? Or was that just coincidence? Or did she just imagine a boy in the woods? She palmed the locket again, then decided to make her first entry in the journal. She pulled a pen from the base of her braid and began to write.
“Pine Tree Locket: magical?” she wrote. “Additional entry by Mabel Pines. Found in an abandoned costume closet in the Mystery Shack. May have the ability to summon boys at will.” She crossed out that last part, thinking it sounded a little too ridiculous. She’d find a better way to phrase it. “May be able to summon mysterious disappearing people. I’m going to try again.”
“But how?” she asked herself. She had no idea how she did it the first time. Maybe rubbing it like a lamp? It seemed ridiculous, but she tried it. Nothing. She tried every way she could think of, thought back to every magical object in every Disney movie, but none of it was working. She sighed and went back to the journal.
“Nothing has been working,” she wrote, “Obviously real magic is different that fairytale magic, or I’d have this thing working much faster. Or I was just crazy. Who knows?” She doodled the locket next to the passage, then flipped the page.
“Hi there, journal. Mabel Pines here. Age: 12. Favorite animal: All of them, but especially pigs. Favorite color: Rainbow. Favorite Food: Pancakes. Favorite season: Summer! Favorite constellation: the Big Dipper.” Next to it she drew the mark she wore on her wrist every day. “I am currently spending the summer with my Grunkle Stan in Gravity Falls, Oregon. My parents are Ariel and Hadron Pines. I’m an only child but—“ Mabel bit her lip. “I didn’t used to be.”
